Earlier this week, it was revealed that
Google had acquired fflick, a site that
lets you log in with your Twitter account, and see what your friends have said
about movies.
According to Jason Kincaid, who first
reported on the acquisition, fflick had
always planned to expand beyond movies, with that just being the first vertical.
It seemed to make sense that Google would take advantage of this to improve its
social search features, including Hotpot. I was
not alone in this thinking.
Having your Twitter friends' opinions about things you search for right along
with the rest of your search results could be pretty valuable.
I was somewhat surprised to see Google
announce the acquisition the next day on
the YouTube blog, saying that the fflick team would become part of the YouTube
team. Don't get me wrong, this makes sense too, as a way to make YouTube (Google's
greatest social asset) more social, in the way Google described.
"Many of the YouTube videos you watch and love are also shared on sites beyond
YouTube.com," said YouTube Group Product Manager Shiva Rajaraman. "Our site is
built, in part, on social tools like comments, video responses and ratings. In
recent years we've worked to integrate these social signals across other popular
social platforms. For example, we see more than 400 tweets per minute containing
a YouTube link, and over 150 years worth of YouTube video is watched on Facebook
every day."
"We've always believed that there are great conversations happening all the time
off of YouTube.com, and that commentary has the potential to enrich your
experience when watching and discovering video on YouTube itself," added
Rajaraman.
Reading a Bloomberg BusinessWeek article about Larry Page's 3.0, one paragraph
in the six-page article caught my eye. It as talking about Google's "social
layer" initiative that is supposed to help it compete with Facebook. It's been
most recently referred to as "Google+1", and the project is being led by
Google's Vic Gundotra.
The article says:
Two sources familiar with it, who asked
not to be named because the project is not yet public, confirm that it is
tentatively called Google +1 and that it is
designed to cull data about relationships
among users from current services such as Gmail and YouTube.
Google will then let
users share material through those connections, while using the information to
make other products more social. Search results may be skewed toward pages that
your friends found useful—for
instance, a Google Maps query for nearby Italian restaurants could return one
that was positively reviewed by someone you know. (emphasis added).
With this in mind, fflick may play a role in the big picture after all, even as
part of the YouTube unit. I can only speculate and try to put some puzzles
pieces together, but something tells me the fflick pick-up is more than just a
way to talk about YouTube videos, especially when you also consider Google's
much-increased focus on local and social.
Thoughts?
Last week, Google's Matt Cutts put up
a blog post talking about a shift in
focus to content farms, which he defines as "sites with shallow or low-quality
content". Most people that read this assumed he was talking about sites like
some of those offered by Demand Media (eHow.com, for example), which
launched an IPO this week valuing the company at $1.5
billion.
It's not that people thought Cutts was talking only about Demand Media, but most
of the time when an article is written about "content farms", Demand Media is
cited, as it has basically become the poster child for the phrase.
Peter Kafka at AllThingsD had
a conversation with Demand Media CEO Richard Rosenblatt
who maintains that a. Demand Media is not a "content farm" and b. Matt Cutts was
not talking about Demand Media in the post.
Rosenblatt is quoted as saying, "It's not directed at us in any way," in
reference to Cutts' comments, though he declined to comment on whether or not he
talked to Google about it.
He is also quoted as saying, "He's talking about duplicate, non-original
content. Every single piece of ours is original. Written by somebody. And I
understand how that could confuse some people, because of that stupid 'content
farm' label, which we got tagged with. I don't know who ever invented it, and
who tagged us with it, but that's not us...We keep getting tagged with 'content
farm'. It's just insulting to our writers. We don't want our writers to feel
like they're part of a 'content farm.'
That's fair. Nobody can blame Rosenblatt for not wanting the label, and the
company has indicated repeatedly that it has stepped up efforts to improve its
quality - though they clearly have a ways to go to reach a high level across the
board.
It's hard to believe, however, that Cutts meant for sites from Demand Media to
not be included under the "content farm" label. As Demand Media is generally the
first company that comes to mind or is mentioned anytime the word "content farm"
is mentioned around the web, why would Cutts use that phrase if Demand was not
included?
Furthermore, Cutts doesn't mention duplicate content in the post, and if that's
what he meant, why wouldn't he have just said "duplicate content", a phrase he's
used many times before. He does say Google's evaulating a change that "
primarily affects sites that copy others’ content and sites with low levels of
original content," but that appears to be in reference to "pure webspam", as he
says, quickly following that with, "attention has shifted instead to 'content
farms,' which are sites with shallow or low-quality content."
Now, that's not to say that there aren't benefits to Google that come from
Demand Media. As Rosenblatt says in the interview, their partnership "makes
sense."
"We help them fill the gaps in their index, where they don't have quality
content...We're the largest supplier of all video to YouTube... we're a large
AdSense partner. So our relationship is synergistic, and it's a great
partnership," said Rosenblatt.
At PubCon in November,
Matt Cutts said there was a debate going on
internally at Google over whether they should consider content farms web spam,
saying they were wrestling about the topic. He said that users were pretty angry
with content farms, adding that there may be a time for web spam at Google to
take action against them.
So it sounds like not everyone agreed on how to handle "content farms". Based on
Cutts' post, it sounds like some kind of decision has been made.
According to Rosenblatt, Demand's traffic only went up when Google implemented
changes last year like Mayday, Caffeine, and Google Instant, but it's hard to
see how Google's new approach will help it. Cutts said in his post, "We hear the
feedback from the web loud and clear: people are asking for even stronger action
on content farms and sites that consist primarily of spammy or low-quality
content."
If "people" are asking for stronger
action on "content farms", are these not the same people tagging Demand Media
with the label?
If Demand Media and other sites that are commonly labeled as content farms want
to continue to reap the Google rewards, they're going to have to keep up the
quality - that is if Google truly does take action like it is indicating, which
we've really yet to see so far.
You can still search for "level 4 brain cancer" on Google and the top 2 results
are from eHow. The top one comes from
a freelance writer with a background in
marriage psychology and family therapy, whose other featured articles on the
site include titles like "Kohler Toilet Won't Flush Completely", "Roper Dryer
Won't Start", and "My Toilet Water Smells".
Again, nothing against the author or even the article, but is it really the
first thing that Google should be showing to someone searching for a term like
"level 4 brain cancer". Wouldn't a more medical-related site make more sense -
even the local results that Google is pushing so often lately for maybe? How
about the National Brain Tumor Society at braintumor.org,
which is displayed in the paid results on
the right-hand side of the page?
The second result is also from eHow, and THEN a guide from the MGH Brain Tumor
Center. Also included in the top ten - results from Associated Content and Yahoo
Answers. Some content from the A.P. John Institute for Cancer Research is the
last result on the page. You get the idea.
Is this not the kind of thing Cutts is talking about?
The top article does not even have any
links in it referencing expert information (though it does have ad links) - no
way to know if the source is trustworthy or if the information is accurate -
nothing to back anything up (though Rosenblatt has claimed in the past that
medical articles are fact-checked with doctors). That's not to say it's not an
accurate article, but how is the reader supposed to know? How is someone with
brain cancer searching for information on the subject supposed to gain anything
helpful from this without questioning it? This is just an example, and it's not
that the article shouldn't have been written, but should it be the most
prominent piece of information related to this query? There is no information
on the page indicating that the writer is in any way an expert on the subject of
brain cancer. He's simply an "eHow contributor".
As far as Demand "filling in the gaps" for Google's search results, it may have
accomplished that, and moved much further into saturating the areas were there
are no gaps.
Therein lies the problem. This is why people are calling for action on content
farms, as Cutts says. Most critics will even acknowledge that there is plenty of
high quality content coming out of Demand Media, Associated Content and others,
but all too often it isn't the highest quality choice of content for the queries
for which it is being presented as such.
Google will not come out and say whether or not it considers Demand Media a
content farm. Even Bloomberg BusinessWeek
reports they've been ignoring the
question from them. That publication calls Demand a content mill, after
interviewing its chief innovation officer.
Is content from so-called "content farms" hurting people? Probably not. I like
to think
people can figure out on their own what content to
trust, based on the information and credentials required, and
that more content also means more options to help you make more informed
decisions, but that doesn't mean the good content is always easy to find under
Google's current system. Sometimes the more relevant content is buried, and the
user has to work harder to reach that goal of the informed decision.
·
5 Tips for Making Your Site More Local-Friendly
Search engines have become one of the primary ways that people find products and
services right in their hometown. This growing reality significantly increases
the need for small local business owners to master this thing called local
search.
There are many ways to make your website pages much more localized. This is one
of the underlying elements that tell the search engines that yours is indeed a
local business.
There are a number of things that website owners can do offsite, such as social
media participation, that help them come up when people look for local goods and
services, but the first step is to make sure that the content on your own site
is local focused.
Below are five ways to make your website more local friendly.
Geo content
Simply adding geographic content to your web pages is one of the fist steps.
This can include your physical address, directions with street and town names,
maps, suburb names and names of communities or neighborhoods where you do work..
It’s also a great idea to do keyword research with local terms to find the best
phrases to localized phrases to add to your pages.
Google Keyword Tool or
Wordtracker.
Geo meta tags are also something worth investigating. Google continues to ignore
them. Bing has admitted they do use them to help determine business location.
These tags go in the head section of a page and list the latitude and longitude
of a business as well as city, state and country.
The tags for my business are:
meta name=”geo.region” content=”US-MO” /
meta name=”geo.placename” content=”Kansas City” /
meta name=”geo.position” content=”39.040409;-94.598657″ /
meta name=”ICBM” content=”39.040409, -94.598657″ /
Here’s
a great Geo Meta Tag tool that will
create these for your business address.
Internal Links and External Anchor
Text
One of the ways that you can enhance the local nature of your onsite and offsite
content is to add local keywords in the internal links on your pages (Links that
send people to another pages on within you site). So a remodeling contractor
that is showcasing kitchen and bath projects located in San Diego would have
links to the project pages that would read San Diego Kitchens and San Diego
Baths rather than simply Baths or Kitchens.
You also want to add local keywords to the text used to link back to your site
from places like LinkedIn or in article directories. So if you’re an attorney in
Texas rather than using your URL or firm name in a link you might use Dallas
Texas Bankruptcy Attorney as the words or anchor text for a link to your site.
Rich Snippets
Google is busy creating some of its own HTML coding to help it find and display
local content and by using what are known as rich snippets you can help Google
find geographic information, information about people in your business and
reviews of products and services.
Beyond improving the presentation of your pages in search results,
rich snippets also help users find your
website when it references a local place. By using
structured markup to describe a business
or organization mentioned on your page, you not only improve the Web by making
it easier to recognize references to specific places but also help Google
surface your site in local search results.
Here’s a good
tutorial for Rich Snippets and Google’s
explanation of
Rich Snippets for Local Search.
Community Resource
It’s become an extremely good idea to add a blog or even use blog software to
run you entire site. This format gives more flexibility when it comes to adding
pages and content.
Many businesses can create tremendous local content by adding features such as
an events calendar or coverage of local happenings around town. It’s not too
hard to find an angle that is relevant to your business, interests or industry
and then use it as a vehicle for producing local content.
If you partner with local non-profits you might consider giving them coverage on
your site.
Local Contributors
One great marketing strategy is to develop a team of local strategic partners –
other businesses that serve your same market. These partners should be looked at
as a great source of potential potent local content.
Invite each member of your team to contribute content to your blog. Create
video interviews with team members and add directory pages with full local
descriptions and ask that they link to these pages with local anchor text.
Find relevant local bloggers using a tool like
placeblogger to exchange links and
content with.
Don’t forget to get your customers in the act too. Create video success stories
and describe the local nature of these customers.
Take a little time over each week to knock out one of these tips and in a little
over month your local site overhaul will be paying dividends.
·
Google Censors "BitTorrent" Suggestions
Early in December, Google vowed to distance itself from piracy. To do so, the company agreed that it would remove terms that are closely associated with piracy from appearing in their Autocomplete and Instant services.
Google has since rolled this questionable feature. Now terms like BitTorrent, uTorrent, and RapidShare are filtered out. However, terms like BitComet and Vuze remain, which suggests that the keywords were picked rather arbitrarily.
This censoring does not affect full search results, but it does show a clear signal that Google is willing to filter its services more proactively than anyone thought.
However, now that the entertainment industry has gotten their way, they'll pressure Google in an attempt to get them to censor search results too.
It appears to be only a matter of time until those results do disappear.
You probably have heard me preach it before: if at all possible, for search engine optimization purposes, your web site should include a blog or other section of your web site that includes articles. To rank well in the search engines, your web site needs new, fresh, topical content added on a regular basis. But to fully take advantage of the search engines and social media, you need to socialize your website’s content. Here is why any good search engine optimization effort must include a social validation program in order to be successful.
Back about two years, I wrote a blog post about social media and search and how “success in social media means that you’ll get noticed in the organic search results. The search engines love fresh, unique content–and they love to find new URLs and links. If your site gets a link on a social media site, it will get noticed and crawled.”
For over two years now (actually a lot longer than that), I continue to combine search engine optimization efforts (both on-page SEO factors as well as off-page factors like a linking campaign) with a very specific targeted social media marketing or what I now call “social validation”.
In order for an article on your web site or even a blog post on your blog to rank well in the search engines, the search engines (Bing and Google) are looking for social validation. They see your new URL and index it, but will rank it higher in the search results if they can find some reason to: and one of those reasons includes social validation.
What is Social Validation?
When you create a new article, blog post, or a new page on your web site (a new
URL), the search engine will crawl that URL. They might even see some links form
other web sites to that new URL. But if the search engines see real people
mentioning the URL and interacting with it, they consider that the URL is
validated, socially. The URL is “accepted”. And it’s that human interaction that
the search engines are looking for. If the search engines can figure out some
form of social validation of a URL, then most likely it is going to be a page
that they will want to show in their search results. Social validation is that
human SEO factor that the search engines have been looking to include in their
algorithm for a very long time.
Social Validation is now a search engine optimization factor. Just like all of the other Search Engine Optimization Ranking Factors out there, anchor text, keyword use in the title tag, diversity of link sources, and trustworthiness of the domain, I am now adding a new search engine optimization factor to my list, social validation.
Social validation is really a dream come true for the search engines. Rather than hire hundreds or even thousands of employees or contractors to review web sites, social validation is a factor that the search engines can rely on in order to do that job. Sure, it’s not as good as hiring real people to review web sites. But it might be even better: the users who use search engines are the same people who frequently participate on social media and social networking web sites. So, it’s only logical that if a URL is liked on a social networking or social media web site, it’s also going to be liked if it shows up in the search results.
If you would like to take a look at social validation more in depth, take a look at this December 2010 article at Search Engine Land. Below some of the questions that Danny Sullivan got answered, along with responses. (For the full list of questions and answers, see the article I just referenced):
1) If an article is retweeted or referenced much in Twitter, do you count that as a signal outside of finding any non-nofollowed links that may naturally result from it?
Bing:
We do look at the social authority of a user. We look at how many people you follow, how many follow you, and this can add a little weight to a listing in regular search results. It carries much more weight in Bing Social Search, where tweets from more authoritative people will flow to the top when best match relevancy is used.
Google:
Yes, we do use it as a signal. It is used as a signal in our organic and news rankings. We also use it to enhance our news universal by marking how many people shared an article [NOTE: see the end of this article for more about that].
I believe now, more than ever, is a time that you need to start implementing social validation as a part of your overall search engine optimization strategy. Perhaps in a future post I will tell you about some of the actual techniques you can use in order to implement true social validation campaign. So for now, I am including a social validation campaign as a critical part of an overall search engine optimization strategy, just like a link building campaign.
Google has a new project in the works that appears to be a direct competitor to
Groupon. It's called Google Offers. According to an official fact sheet about
the product,
obtained by Mashable, Google Offers is
"a new product to help potential customers and clientele find great deals in
their area through a daily email."
Should Groupon have sold to Google when it had the chance?
Share your thoughts.
This sounds exactly like Groupon, and based on the screenshot embedded in the
document (view the whole thing
here), it looks quite similar too.
"For businesses, it's a smart and easy way to find new high -value customers and
bring them right to you," the sheet says. "With our prepaid model, there are no
out-of-pocket expenses to spread the word about your business to the millions of
Google users and subscribers in your local area. You only pay when a customer
buys your offer."
Benefits mentioned in the document include: getting in front of potential
customers in your city, bringing in both new and valuable customers with great
deals, exposure across Google ad networks at no additional cost, managing your
offer with tools to track and measure ROI, and getting paid quickly with no
out-of-pocket expenses.
It then proceeds to outline a five-step process for businesses to create an
offer, market it, run the offer, collect the money, and serve customers.
Now, the product is not widely available yet, but the company has confirmed that
it is in fact real. Google
gave Search Engine Land the following statement:
Google is communicating with small
businesses to enlist their support and participation in a test of a pre-paid
offers/vouchers program. This initiative is part of an ongoing effort at Google
to make new products, such as the recent Offer Ads beta, that connect businesses
with customers in new ways. We do not have more details to share at this time,
but will keep you posted.
So, the keyword there is "test", but it's hard to imagine this not turning into
a full-fledged offering, considering the company's obvious thirst for jumping
into this space. As you probably know, Google recently offered a reported $6
billion to acquire Groupon, the leader in the deals space, but Groupon turned it
down, and is reportedly preparing for a $15 billion IPO.
The question is: was Groupon smart
to turn down Google’s offer? All valuations are based on growth,
and a lot can happen in a year – especially a year when Google is one of your
main competitors. And Google already has a lot of relationships with businesses
and users (through various products, search, business listings, advertising,
etc.) that Groupon is still working on building.
During Google's earnings call, in which the company discussed the new changes in
management, co-founder Sergey Brin
alluded to some new products that are coming,
but would not get specific. We wonder if this is one he was referring to.
Google's former VP of Search Products and User Experience, Marissa Mayer, who
recently
shifted to Google's products and
services related to local markets and geolocation, pointed out recently that
Google already has Groupon-like products.
"I think that when you look at our overall suite of services, especially around
our advertising, we already have some things that are like this," Mayer said in
an
interview with Media Beat (embedded
below). "We have things like coupons and offer extension ads that allow
merchants to basically make offers to our users. So we're looking at how we can
take that technology and put it to use, especially in the location space."
Well, Google Offers would be a much more obvious product to compete in the
space, and could only complement Google's existing offerings, which span far and
wide. According to Google's earnings report for the fourth quarter of 2010,
Google generated $8.44 billion in revenue. Obviously much of that is from
advertising. You can see the exact breakdown as reported
here.
Google's advertising reach is far and wide, and the company is
increasingly returning local search results
over true organic web results in general searches. If Google Offers gets
incorporated into this (and it's hard to imagine that it won't), it's going to
be incredibly powerful. It's worth noting that Google Offers also utilizes
Google Checkout from the looks of the screenshot, but that's another story.
So, one has to wonder if Google made the right decision by rejecting Google's
offer. Should the company have accepted or does it have the power to remain a
leader in the space?
Groupon is rapidly expanding into more countries (sometimes
by acquisition of other Groupon clones), and it just
raised nearly a billion dollars in a recent round of funding.
Groupon says it intends to use this toward fueling global expansion, investing
in technology, and providing liquidity for employees and early investors.
Groupon is also
gearing up to advertise during the Super Bowl pre-game
(the game itself was sold out). This should attract a lot of eyeballs, and could
help spread the Groupon brand name to a lot more people who aren't already using
it.
It's also worth noting, however, that last year, Google ran it's first-ever TV
spot during the Super Bowl. The leak of Google Offers comes at an interesting
time (just before the AFC and NFC championship games, which will determine who
goes to the Super Bowl, to be played next month). Could Google have something in
store for the Big Game this year?
Before announcing his new role with the company,
Eric Schmidt discussed the key points of Google's
strategy for 2011, and they are all about mobile. And where does
local search work the best?
Perhaps it's premature to say, but Google may become a force to be reckoned with
in the deals space that Groupon is currently enjoying. Google hasn't had the
best of luck in all of it's endeavors, but this has potentially huge ties to
both of the things Google is best at - search and advertising. Plus, it's not
like acquiring more Groupon clones is out of the question.
Related: If
You're Not Local, How Can You Compete in an Increasingly Local Google?
Will Google dominate the deals
space?
Tell us what you think in the comments,
or
join the discussion on our Facebook page.
·
In PR, There's No Such Thing As A One-Day Story
Yesterday, I wrote about how NBC has handled Keith Olbermann's departure from his show on MSNBC. Writing that story put me in mind of one of the hoary chestnuts of public relations strategy, which is to let sleeping dogs lie for some situations. Veteran PR folks are fond of refering to a minor flap as a "one-day story," meaning that you read about it in the newspaper today, but it disappears tomorrow. Unfortunately, the Internet has forever ended the technique of letting the storm blow over.
First, it was Google.
Stories that broke years ago are still easily found by searchers, whether they are looking for them or not. I have clients (they'd love not to be named here) where you can search on their company name and find (as search result #4 or #5, perhaps) a negative story about them. In some cases the story isn't even true—the classic situation where PR people counsel the on-day story approach.
The reasoning always went that some stories are so unfair that it is best "not to dignify them with a comment," the idea being that responding to the spurious charges just "kept the story alive" in the press. If the charges hit on Monday, then your response becomes the story on Tuesday, with even more people hearing about those falsehoods. Not responding, the reasoning goes, ended the negative publicity on day one. People would have to stop by the local library to go back and read about that story after Monday.
This clearly the thought process of a bygone era, now that we are in the age of Google, but I still sometimes hear well-meaning people provide this advice. I no longer hear this from too many PR professionals—most have figured out what we need to do differently—but I often hear business people parrot this advice because years ago they heard some smart person say it. We all need to accept that this world has changed.
Google can turn up any story on you, even years later. As they used to tell you in school, "It's part of your permanent record." Your only safe strategy is to respond so that when people find the story, they also find your response.
But Google isn't the only factor in this changed world. Social media has also made a huge difference, because blogs, Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube keep stories alive day after day. (I did this yesterday with the Keith Olbermann story.) As each pundit chips in with their opinion, more and more people hear about the original story. And when they do, they Google it even more to learn more details. If all that is out there is the negative charge, then people will make up their minds without your side of the story.
I know that responding is scary. It feels safer to let the story run its course without your comment. It feels like your comment can only "add fuel to the fire," and the truth is that you do run that risk. If you provide a ham-handed lame answer, expect to be pilloried. But the right answer can nip a crisis in the bud. The right answer can change people's minds. The right answer can protect your brand image. The right answer can rally your supporters to your defense.
No answer can't do any of those things, and leaves your reputation in the hands of your critics. You wouldn't do that with any other corporate asset, so it's time to stop talking about the "one-day" story.
Google has partnered with Israel's Yad Vashem museum to put the world's largest
collection of Holocaust documents and photos online.
In the first part of the initiative 130,000 photos from Yad Vashem's archive
will be viewable online, the day before International Holocaust Remembrance Day.
“Google is an integral partner in our mission, as they help us to reach new
audiences, including young people around the world, enabling them to be active
in the discussion about the Holocaust,” said Avner Shalev, Chairman,
Yad Vashem.
Google has implemented experimental optical character recognition (OCR)
technology to carry out this project, making previously difficult to locate
documents searchable and discoverable online.
The Jerusalem-based archive is devoted to the documentation, research, education
and commemoration of the Holocaust. As of today, its photo collection will be
made more widely accessible for people around the world to search and discover
the photographs on its website and share their own personal stories and
thoughts.
“For some time, Google has been working to bring the world’s historical and
cultural heritage online. The Internet offers a great opportunity to preserve
and share important materials stored in archives,” said Yossi Matias, Director
of Google’s R&D centre in Israel.
“We’re privileged to be able to work with the world’s foremost Holocaust archive
on this project.”
Demand Media shares are listing today in the New York Stock Exchange under the
DMD symbol, as the company's IPO of 8.9 million shares priced out at $17 a share
(above estimates of $114 - $16).
The IPO raised a reported $151.3 million valuing the company at just under $1.5
billion.
According to the
Dow Jones Newswires, "Revenue at Demand
Media from its advertising and domain registrations grew throughout the economic
downturn, though the company hasn't been profitable in an operating or net basis
since 2007, when it was bought by a venture and private equity investors
including Oak Investment Partners, Spectrum Equity Investors, W Capital Partners
and [CEO] Mr. Rosenblatt."
$1.5 is a pretty high valuation that is going to take a lot of ad clicks to live
up to, and it's going to take Google not hurting their search rankings too
much.
The timing of this is quite interesting, as Google is now
talking about a shifted focus to "content farms,"
which Demand Media is often labeled as. Google calls content farms sites with
"shallow or low-quality content".
The quality of Demand's content is mixed, and the company has
expressed determination to improve it.
The story gets more complicated, as iEntry CEO (and WebProNews Publisher) Rich
Ord
outlined in his open letter to Google here.
If Google intends to hold true to its recent statements, Demand is going to keep
the quality up to get the benefit of Google's traffic, which has been its main
driver.
It's that time of year again that we can look forward to the
Edelman Trust Barometer which was
published today. There are some important insights for corporate communicators
and I have summarised a few that caught my attention.
Do however look at the Edelman Trust Barometer website for more reports and
multimedia – in fact take a look at the range of platforms they are using to
make information available including Quora.com – reviewing the website is a case
study itself for corporate communicators or anyone publishing research.
Additional resources I am sure will be published in the weeks ahead for specific
markets – I am hoping there will be an Irish report published.
The report indicates the importance of repetition – the more we hear something
the more likely we are to believe it – 59% of respondents will believe the
information they receive if they hear it 3-5 times. That will also apply to
internal communications and reinforces the need for consistency in your
communication with employees especially at times of change.
We certainly love search engines as it's rated by the respondents of the survey to be not only the preferred first source for news about a company (29% of respondents) but also 23% of people will turn to it as their second source of information.
The results on who is seen as a credible spokes person in the global study is somewhat of a surprise given just a few years ago the results indicated that the respondent reported that it was 'a person like me'. Significantly the most credible spokespeople are seen as an academic or expert, a technical expert within the company, a financial or industry analyst followed by the CEO.
In the event that you do have a crisis the results of the survey show there is a difference in terms of who will be the most credible person to represent your company, product or service dependent on if there is impact to a local community or if you have a product recall. Overall however the preferred spokesperson is the CEO. What implications does this have for you in terms of making sure that your crisis communications team is prepared to respond as a spokesperson in the media?
What matters most in the context of corporate reputation is unsurprisingly high quality of services or products, transparent and honest business practices, being a company people can trust and how well you treat employees. With the advent of social media it's never been easier for people to get a 360 view from friends and colleagues about how a company performs in these areas.
You can see the summary of the global results for the 2011 Edelman Trust Barometer here:
Update:
Apparently the acquisition is more about YouTube. Interesting. Google's official
announcement
here.
Original Article: TechCrunch
is
reporting that Google is in the process
of acquiring fflick for about $10 million, with the deal expected to close this
week. This is still unconfirmed at this point, but unless we hear otherwise,
we'll assume it's accurate.
So what is fflick? It's a site where you can log in with your Twitter account
and see what your friends have said about movies. For example, if you want to
see what people think about Iron Man 2, you can search for it on fflick, and see
all of the tweets your friends have posted mentioning the movie. If you follow
any movie review sites, those will be included too, so depending on who you
follow, you can have quite a comprehensive, yet personalized experience. It's a
pretty good idea.
While we don't know what Google would do with this for sure, the first thing
that comes to mind is to integrate it with
Hotpot - the company's recently launched social, local business
recommendation engine. The biggest problem with Hotpot, as it stands, is that it
requires you to get your friends to use it for it to be very helpful.
Google just released a new feature for Hotpot, which lets you
return all recommendations from certain friends.
If users could simply tap their Twitter friends while doing these searches,
they'd be more likely to get helpful results.
According to Jason Kincaid, who reported on the acquisition, fflick had always
planned to expand beyond movies anyway, with that just being the first vertical.
Google could conceivably expand this into all kinds of verticals and ultimately
make searching with Google more social in general (as long as the user is on
Twitter).
Could Google have done this without acquiring fflick? Probably, but since they
already have a system in place, it could be a time saver more than anything.
We've reached out to Google for confirmation on the acquisition, and will update
accordingly.
Bing has introduced a new landing page style for its image search feature. Now
when you go to Bing, and click on "images", you will be presented with a page
that graphically displays the top 20 current image searches and images that
accompany them.
"The landing page assembles the top images in full fidelity so you can get a
quick snap-shot of some of the most popular image searches on Bing,"
says the Bing Image Search team. "Once
you click through to the 'images' page you will notice that we've populated the
tabs with the most common search queries associated with a given image. With
one simple click, you can narrow down the images to find just what you’re
looking for or be inspired to discover more."
Images have always been one of Bing's strong suits, from the style of scrolling
the search engine offers on image search results, which was later
copied by Google, to the Bing home page,
which displays a photo of the day, which was
kind of also copied by Google.
It will be interesting to see if Google adopts a similar strategy with its
image search landing page after this. Currently, Google just has the plain page
with the Google logo/search box, which resembles the search engine's classic
home page. Bing's new approach is certainly more interesting.
"The landing page assembles the top images in full fidelity so you can get a
quick snap-shot of some of the most popular image searches on Bing," Bing
explains. "Once you click through to the 'images' page you will notice that
we've populated the tabs with the most common search queries associated with a
given image. With one simple click, you can narrow down the images to find just
what you’re looking for or be inspired to discover more."
Other recently added features to the Bing search engine include
TV listings and
sports ticketing information, as well as
enhanced auto search results.
·
Rumors of Friction Between Schmidt and Google Founders
Surface
Ken Auletta, author of the book Googled:
The End of the World As We Know It, has written
an interesting piece for The New Yorker,
claiming to know more about why Eric Schmidt has
relinquished his CEO role to Google co-founder Larry
Page (effective April 4).
Auletta, who claims to have conducted 11 interviews with Schmidt for the book,
writes:
According to close advisors, the Google
C.E.O. was upset a year ago when co-founder Larry Page sided with his founding
partner, Sergey Brin, to withdraw censored searches from China. Schmidt did not
hide his belief that Google should stay in the world’s largest consumer
marketplace. It was an indication of the nature of the relationship Schmidt had
with the founders that he—as Brian Cashman of the Yankees did this
week—acknowledged that the decision was made above his head. He often joked that
he provided "adult supervision," and was never shy about interrupting the
founders at meetings to crystallize a point.
Schmidt, according to associates, lost
some energy and focus after losing the China decision. At the same time, Google
was becoming defensive. All of their social-network efforts had faltered.
Facebook had replaced them as the hot tech company, the place vital engineers
wanted to work. Complaints about Google bureaucracy intensified. Governments
around the world were lobbing grenades at Google over privacy, copyright, and
size issues. The "don’t be evil" brand was getting tarnished, and the founders
were restive. Schmidt started to think of departing. Nudged by a board-member
friend and an outside advisor that he had to re-energize himself, he decided
after Labor Day that he could reboot.
Stepping up as Exec Chairman. New to-do’s: London-Monday. Munich-Tues. Zurich-Wed. Davos-Thurs…
According to Auletta, an advisor said that Schmidt was considering staying
around for a year as Executive Chairman and then moving onto something else.
This is interesting considering that Sergey Brin said yesterday that he was
looking forward to working with Schmidt (and Page) for decades.
Schmidt has indicated that he will be much more involved in the external
dealings of the company as opposed to the internal dealings (day-to-day
operations). We'll see how long this actually lasts. I guess it won't come as a
complete surprise, should Schmidt end up leaving the company at some point, but
for now, it seems he's still got a job to do (see above tweet for starters).
It's important to keep rumors in perspective, and consider that Google has made
no indication whatsoever that Schmidt is going anywhere.
In a
post on the official Google Blog, Matt
Cutts, head of the company's webspam team said that Google's search quality is
the best it has ever been in terms of relevance, freshness, and
comprehensiveness.
Do
you agree that Google's search quality is the best it's ever been?
Share your thoughts.
"Today, English-language spam in Google's results is less than half what it was
five years ago, and spam in most other languages is even lower than in English,"
said Cutts. "However, we have seen a slight uptick of spam in recent months, and
while we’ve already made progress, we have new efforts underway to continue to
improve our search quality."
"As we've increased both our size and freshness in recent months, we’ve
naturally indexed a lot of good content and some spam as well," explains Cutts.
"To respond to that challenge, we recently launched a redesigned document-level
classifier that makes it harder for spammy on-page content to rank highly. The
new classifier is better at detecting spam on individual web pages, e.g.,
repeated spammy words—the sort of phrases you tend to see in junky, automated,
self-promoting blog comments. We’ve also radically improved our ability to
detect hacked sites, which were a major source of spam in 2010. And we’re
evaluating multiple changes that should help drive spam levels even lower,
including one change that primarily affects sites that copy others’ content and
sites with low levels of original content. We’ll continue to explore ways to
reduce spam, including new ways for users to give more explicit feedback about
spammy and low-quality sites."
The post was in response to a lot of talk throughout the Blogosphere lately that
Google is losing its edge in search - when it comes to relevancy and spam. Some
of this was no doubt fueled by the recent launch of the spam clock from Blekko,
which may not be on the minds of much of the general public, but that many
influential bloggers in the search space are certainly aware of.
Watch an
interview we did the other day with
Blekko CEO Rich Skrenta about web spam here:
Cutts says it is a misconception that Google doesn't take as strong an action on
spam in its index if the spammy sites are Google ads.
"To be crystal clear," he says, "Google
absolutely takes action on sites that violate our quality guidelines regardless
of whether they have ads powered by Google; Displaying Google ads does not help
a site’s rankings in Google; and Buying Google ads does not increase a site's
rankings in Google's search results. These principles have always applied, but
it's important to affirm they still hold true."
Something tells me Cutts and Google will never convince everybody, but at least
they're being "crystal clear" in their explanation.
·
Steve Ballmer Comments on Obama's Appointment of GE CEO
Immelt to Jobs Council
President Obama appointed General Electric CEO Jeff Immelt as chairman of the
President's Council on Jobs and Competitiveness.
Having worked with Immelt in the past, Ballmer apparently wanted the world to
know where he stands. He released the following statement on the Official
Microsoft blog:
"Jeff Immelt and I started our careers together at Proctor & Gamble, and I have
enormous respect for the success he’s had at GE. He is an ideal business leader
to chair the President's Council on Jobs and Competitiveness and help drive a
focus on what we can all do to increase American competitiveness and create new
jobs."
Microsoft is all about some competitiveness lately, as evidenced by the company
recently
joining Fairsearch, the coalition
ruffling Google's feathers over its pending acquisition of ITA Software.
Yesterday during Google's earnings call, Schmidt managed to sneak in a jab at
Microsoft (at least that's how we interpreted it) by
saying that Googe's competitors are assisting in spreading misinformation
about competition.
Schmidt has referred to Bing as its main competitor in recent months, and Google
told us a while back, "Microsoft is our
largest competitor and lobbies regulators against every acquisition we make."
As reported, Google CEO Eric Schmidt is
turning over his CEO role to co-founder Larry Page,
in favor of an Executive Chairman role. We sat in on a call with those two and
co-founder Sergey Brin, who
talked a little bit about the management strategy.
During the Q&A session, Schmidt talked for a minute about the government
scrutiny Google has been dealing with, saying that lots of the problems are
things that people "just don't really understand what we really do." He also
mentioned that competitors are assisting in spreading the misinformation.
I'm wondering if this is in reference to FairSearch, a coalition of travel sites
that are making a lot of noise about Google's pending acquisition of ITA
Software. Recently,
Microsoft climbed aboard. Back then,
Adam Kovacevich, Google Sr. Manager, Global Communications and Public Affairs
told us:
"I'm not sure there are any surprises
here. Microsoft is our largest competitor and lobbies regulators against every
acquisition we make...
Schmidt says Google's strategy is just to communicate and be as transparent as
possible.
"The regulators have job to do," he said. "They're there for a reason, and we
respect that." He added that they try to stay away from things that are too
close to hampering competition. I'm sure Fairsearch and other critics will have
something to say about that, but that is the stance Google is taking. If you
want to hear both sides arguing about the ITA deal in particular, with regards
to competition,
read the argument here.
Either way, this is the kind of stuff Schmidt will be focused on in his new
role, which includes things like: deals, partnerships, customers and broader
business relationships, government outreach and technology thought leadership.
Listening to Google's earnings call, the conversation began with the big news - Eric Schmidt is stepping down as CEO of the company. Unfortunately, not a whole lot of previously unavailable information came out of that, but there was a quick introduction of the news from Schmidt, Larry Page (who will take his place) and Sergey Brin, followed by a Q&A with those three. They apparently didn't have the time to stick around any longer, so it went by very fast.
Schmidt talked about how the company has had such a strong year, and how the three of them have spent a lot of time talking about how to run everything and how they can do so even better. Historically, Schmidt said, the three had made decisions together, but a new structure would help to clarify things.
He did mention that the move has been approved by the board.
Page congratulated Schmidt on an "outstanding job" running the company for the past decade, and said he couldn't imagine having had a better leader, and that "the results speak for themselves...I don't think anyone will argue with that...No One else could've accomplished what Eric's done."
Brin also talked about how great a time he's had working with Larry for fifteen years and with Schmidt for ten, and looks forward to "many more decades working together." He hinted at some new products, but didn't really give much of a hint, simply saying he hopes to show us when they're ready.
Schmidt says he'll be taking a more strategic view of things, focusing on external issues, rather than internal. "I believe Larry is ready," he said, adding that his ideas are "interesting and clever."
He also said that he doesn't anticipate on any material change with the company...just executing better.
Update:
Looks like
there is likely to be a lot more local action coming Google's way soon.
Original Article: There's
no question that Google has been putting a lot of focus on local results lately
- from the release of products like Google Places and Hotpot (the company's
personalized and social recommendation engine) to an increasing amount of
queries simply retrieving local results - often above other organic listings.
We had an extensive
conversation about this with industry veteran Bruce
Clay at PubCon a couple months ago, and webmasters and SEOs have
been stressing about it all over the web. In fact, just today, one consulting
firm
ran a press release talking about the
competitive advantages local business owners have as a result of recent changes
with Google.
Do
local businesses have the upper hand in Google?
Tell us what you think.
Consultant (and founder of the firm,
LocalMarketingProfitFaucet says there's
a new type of Google Gold Rush. He's referring to getting the prime listings
from Google Places, which Google will often place at the top of the SERPs.
"This change is having an immediate and positive impact on the local businesses
shown in these Page 1 listings," says Adams. "The Internet-savvy business owners
who understand how to take advantage of this are generating new customers for
next-to-nothing. Meanwhile, a surprising number are still oblivious to the
significance of this change. In fact, Google has revealed that only a tiny
percentage of local businesses have even claimed their Google Places listing,
let alone optimize it."
"From our experience," Adams continues, "Google has always given preferential
treatment to unique, multimedia content that is kept fresh and up to date. And
of course, stay away from any black hat tactics that try to game the system.
Google always catches up to these shenanigans. When they do, your listing could
be banned with no warning and no second chances."
If local businesses have the competitive advantage now, then some non-local
businesses are wondering how they're supposed to compete with that. After all,
the far reach of the web has historically been an attractive reason to start a
business in the first place.
In a new video uploaded to Google's Webmaster YouTube channel, Matt Cutts (head
of the company's webspam team) addressed a user-submitted question: "In a search
environment where local is becoming increasingly important (and more full on the
SERP), how can an out of town company compete with the local based (and locally
housed) competition without lying to show up in these results?"
Cutts responded by saying, "The entire page of web rankings is there that out of
town people can compete on, so the idea of the local universal results is to
show local businesses, so in some sense, there's not really a way where if
you're out of town, you can sort of show up (within our guidelines), and show up
as a local business."
"Now, if you are a mobile business - so for example, maybe you're a plumber, and
you get into your pickup truck, and you drive around in a particular area - so
if you're a mobile business, then in Google Places you can specify a service
area, which is roughly 50 miles around where you're based, but that's only if
you actually have some base of operations there," he continues. "You can't be
based in Topeka and claim that you have a service area in Wyoming if you have no
physical presence there."
"I think that that's a good idea. You do want to have local businesses show up,
and I know that the team has really been paying a lot of attention to try and
improve Maps quality, make it more robust, check on the authenticity of
businesses, and that will only continue," adds Cutts.
In other words, if you're not a local business, there's nothing much you can do
about getting the kind of visibility the local businesses are getting, should
Google deem the user's query worthy of the local results. I might suggest
finding queries related to your business that aren't returning local results and
giving these some more attention, and of course there's always AdWords.
If there's a particular geographic market that you're after, but you're not
based there, you may want to consider setting up shop. In the end, Google is
just going to do what it thinks will help users. Whether or not you buy that is
up to you, but they're not going to deviate from that stance, and if it
encourages more people to buy AdWords ads, then so be it.
You can expect there to be a great amount of focus continued to be placed on
local. The company even moved former VP of Search products, Marissa Mayer, to
this area of focus, and with mobile becoming such a big part of the way people
search, local is by default going to be a bigger part of what people are
actually looking for.
Has Google's increased focus on
local hurt your search rankings and visibility?
Let us know in the comments.
Google just dropped a bombshell: Eric Schmidt is out as CEO (as announced in the company's earings report. We'll be covering the company's earnings call, which is sure to have more on this.
He will step down from the role starting April 4, and co-founder Larry Page will
take charge of Google's day-to-day operations as CEO. Co-founder Sergey Brin
will devote his energy to strategic projects like working on new products.
Schmidt will assume the role of Executive Chairman, focusing externally on
deals, partnerships, customers and broader business relationships, government
outreach and technology thought leadership--all of which are increasingly
important given Google's global reach. Internally, he will continue to act as an
advisor to Larry and Sergey.
On the Official Google Blog, Schmidt
writes:
When I
joined Google in 2001 I never imagined—even in my wildest dreams—that we would
get as far, as fast as we have today. Search has quite literally changed
people’s lives—increasing the collective sum of the world’s knowledge and
revolutionizing advertising in the process. And our emerging businesses—display,
Android, YouTube and Chrome—are on fire. Of course, like any successful
organization we’ve had our fair share of good luck, but the entire team—now over
24,000 Googlers globally—deserves most of the credit.
And as
our results today show, the outlook
is bright.
But as Google has grown, managing the business has become more complicated. So
Larry, Sergey and I have been talking for a long time about how best to simplify
our management structure and speed up decision making—and over the holidays we
decided now was the right moment to make some changes to the way we are
structured.
For the
last 10 years, we have all been equally involved in making decisions. This
triumvirate approach has real benefits in terms of shared wisdom, and we will
continue to discuss the big decisions among the three of us. But we have also
agreed to clarify our individual roles so there’s clear responsibility and
accountability at the top of the company.
Larry
will now lead product development and technology strategy, his greatest
strengths, and starting from April 4 he will take charge of our day-to-day
operations as Google’s Chief Executive Officer. In this new role I know he will
merge Google’s technology and business vision brilliantly. I am enormously proud
of my last decade as CEO, and I am certain that the next 10 years under Larry
will be even better! Larry, in my clear opinion, is ready to lead.
Sergey has
decided to devote his time and energy to strategic projects, in particular
working on new products. His title will be Co-Founder. He’s an innovator and
entrepreneur to the core, and this role suits him perfectly.
As Executive
Chairman, I will focus wherever I can add the greatest value: externally, on the
deals, partnerships, customers and broader business relationships, government
outreach and technology thought leadership that are increasingly important given
Google’s global reach; and internally as an advisor to Larry and Sergey.
We are
confident that this focus will serve Google and our users well in the future.
Larry, Sergey and I have worked exceptionally closely together for over a
decade—and we anticipate working together for a long time to come. As friends,
co-workers and computer scientists we have a lot in common, most important of
all a profound belief in the potential for technology to make the world a better
place. We love Google—our people, our products and most of all the opportunity
we have to improve the lives of millions of people around the world.
Earlier Schmidt wrote an ineresting post at Harvard Business Review today indicating that Google's strategic initiatives for the year are all about mobile. He wrote:
First, we must focus on developing the underlying fast networks (generally called LTE). These will be 8-to-10- megabit networks, roughly 10 times what we have today, which will usher in new and creative applications, mostly entertainment and social, for these phone platforms.
Second, we must attend to the development of mobile money. Phones, as we know, are used as banks in many poorer parts of the world—and modern technology means that their use as financial tools can go much further than that.
Third, we want to increase the availability of inexpensive smartphones in the
poorest parts of the world. We envision literally a billion people getting
inexpensive, browser-based touchscreen phones over the next few years. Can you
imagine how this will change their awareness of local and global information and
their notion of education? And that will be just the start.
Here's the full release including
the financials (see
the balance sheets here):
MOUNTAIN
VIEW, Calif. – January 20, 2011 – Google Inc. (NASDAQ: GOOG) today announced
financial results for the quarter and the fiscal year ended December 31, 2010.
"Q4 marked a terrific end to a stellar year," said Eric Schmidt, CEO of Google. "Our strong performance has been driven by a rapidly growing digital economy, continuous product innovation that benefits both users and advertisers, and by the extraordinary momentum of our newer businesses, such as display and mobile. These results give us the optimism and confidence to invest heavily in future growth -- investments that will benefit our users, Google and the wider web."
In addition, Google has also announced plans to streamline decision making and create clearer lines of responsibility and accountability at the top of the company.
§ Starting from April 4, Larry Page, Google Co-Founder, will take charge of Google's day-to-day operations as Chief Executive Officer.
§ Sergey Brin, Google Co-Founder, will devote his energy to strategic projects, in particular working on new products.
§ Eric Schmidt will assume the role of Executive Chairman, focusing externally on deals, partnerships, customers and broader business relationships, government outreach and technology thought leadership--all of which are increasingly important given Google's global reach. Internally, he will continue to act as an advisor to Larry and Sergey.
Commenting on these changes, Eric said: "We've been talking about how best to simplify our management structure and speed up decision making for a long time. By clarifying our individual roles we'll create clearer responsibility and accountability at the top of the company. In my clear opinion, Larry is ready to lead and I'm excited about working with both him and Sergey for a long time to come."
Larry said: "Eric has clearly done an outstanding job leading Google for the last decade. The results speak for themselves. There is no other CEO in the world that could have kept such headstrong founders so deeply involved and still run the business so brilliantly. Eric is a tremendous leader and I have learned innumerable lessons from him. His advice and efforts will be invaluable to me as I start in this new role. Google still has such incredible opportunity--we are only at the beginning and I can't wait to get started."
Google reported revenues of $8.44 billion for the quarter ended December 31, 2010, an increase of 26% compared to the fourth quarter of 2009. Google reports its revenues, consistent with GAAP, on a gross basis without deducting traffic acquisition costs (TAC). In the fourth quarter of 2010, TAC totaled $2.07 billion, or 25% of advertising revenues.
Google reports operating income, operating margin, net income, and earnings per share (EPS) on a GAAP and non-GAAP basis. The non-GAAP measures, as well as free cash flow, an alternative non-GAAP measure of liquidity, are described below and are reconciled to the corresponding GAAP measures in the accompanying financial tables.
§ GAAP operating income in the fourth quarter of 2010 was $2.98 billion, or 35% of revenues. This compares to GAAP operating income of $2.48 billion, or 37% of revenues, in the fourth quarter of 2009. Non-GAAP operating income in the fourth quarter of 2010 was $3.38 billion, or 40% of revenues. This compares to non-GAAP operating income of $2.76 billion, or 41% of revenues, in the fourth quarter of 2009.
§ GAAP net income in the fourth quarter of 2010 was $2.54 billion, compared to $1.97 billion in the fourth quarter of 2009. Non-GAAP net income in the fourth quarter of 2010 was $2.85 billion, compared to $2.19 billion in the fourth quarter of 2009.
§ GAAP EPS in the fourth quarter of 2010 was $7.81 on 326 million diluted shares outstanding, compared to $6.13 in the fourth quarter of 2009 on 322 million diluted shares outstanding. Non-GAAP EPS in the fourth quarter of 2010 was $8.75, compared to $6.79 in the fourth quarter of 2009.
§ Non-GAAP operating income and non-GAAP operating margin exclude the expenses related to stock-based compensation (SBC). Non-GAAP net income and non-GAAP EPS exclude the expenses related to SBC and the related tax benefits. In the fourth quarter of 2010, the charge related to SBC was $396 million, compared to $276 million in the fourth quarter of 2009. The tax benefit related to SBC was $89 million in the fourth quarter of 2010 and $62 million in the fourth quarter of 2009.
Revenues – Google reported revenues of $8.44 billion in the fourth quarter of 2010, representing a 26% increase over fourth quarter 2009 revenues of $6.67 billion. Google reports its revenues, consistent with GAAP, on a gross basis without deducting TAC.
Google Sites Revenues - Google-owned sites generated revenues of $5.67 billion, or 67% of total revenues, in the fourth quarter of 2010. This represents a 28% increase over fourth quarter 2009 revenues of $4.42 billion.
Google Network Revenues - Google's partner sites generated revenues, through AdSense programs, of $2.50 billion, or 30% of total revenues, in the fourth quarter of 2010. This represents a 22% increase from fourth quarter 2009 network revenues of $2.04 billion.
International Revenues - Revenues from outside of the United States totaled $4.38 billion, representing 52% of total revenues in the fourth quarter of 2010, compared to 52% in the third quarter of 2010 and 53% in the fourth quarter of 2009. Excluding gains related to our foreign exchange risk management program, had foreign exchange rates remained constant from the third quarter of 2010 through the fourth quarter of 2010, our revenues in the fourth quarter of 2010 would have been $201 million lower. Excluding gains related to our foreign exchange risk management program, had foreign exchange rates remained constant from the fourth quarter of 2009 through the fourth quarter of 2010, our revenues in the fourth quarter of 2010 would have been $132 million higher.
§ Revenues from the United Kingdom totaled $878 million, representing 10% of revenues in the fourth quarter of 2010, compared to 12% in the fourth quarter of 2009.
§ In the fourth quarter of 2010, we recognized a benefit of $25 million to revenues through our foreign exchange risk management program, compared to $8 million in the fourth quarter of 2009.
Paid Clicks – Aggregate paid clicks, which include clicks related to ads served on Google sites and the sites of our AdSense partners, increased approximately 18% over the fourth quarter of 2009 and increased approximately 11% over the third quarter of 2010.
Cost-Per-Click – Average cost-per-click, which includes clicks related to ads served on Google sites and the sites of our AdSense partners, increased approximately 5% over the fourth quarter of 2009 and increased approximately 4% over the third quarter of 2010.
TAC - Traffic Acquisition Costs, the portion of revenues shared with Google's partners, increased to $2.07 billion in the fourth quarter of 2010, compared to TAC of $1.72 billion in the fourth quarter of 2009. TAC as a percentage of advertising revenues was 25% in the fourth quarter of 2010, compared to 27% in the fourth quarter of 2009.
The majority of TAC is related to amounts ultimately paid to our AdSense partners, which totaled $1.74 billion in the fourth quarter of 2010. TAC also includes amounts ultimately paid to certain distribution partners and others who direct traffic to our website, which totaled $333 million in the fourth quarter of 2010.
Other Cost of Revenues - Other cost of revenues, which is comprised primarily of data center operational expenses, amortization of intangible assets, content acquisition costs as well as credit card processing charges, increased to $877 million, or 10% of revenues, in the fourth quarter of 2010, compared to $688 million, or 10% of revenues, in the fourth quarter of 2009.
Operating Expenses - Operating expenses, other than cost of revenues, were $2.51 billion in the fourth quarter of 2010, or 30% of revenues, compared to $1.78 billion in the fourth quarter of 2009, or 27% of revenues.
Stock-Based Compensation (SBC) – In the fourth quarter of 2010, the total charge related to SBC was $396 million, compared to $276 million in the fourth quarter of 2009.
We currently estimate SBC charges for grants to employees prior to January 1, 2011 to be approximately $1.6 billion for 2011. This estimate does not include expenses to be recognized related to employee stock awards that are granted after December 31, 2010 or non-employee stock awards that have been or may be granted.
Operating Income - GAAP operating income in the fourth quarter of 2010 was $2.98 billion, or 35% of revenues. This compares to GAAP operating income of $2.48 billion, or 37% of revenues, in the fourth quarter of 2009. Non-GAAP operating income in the fourth quarter of 2010 was $3.38 billion, or 40% of revenues. This compares to non-GAAP operating income of $2.76 billion, or 41% of revenues, in the fourth quarter of 2009.
Interest and Other Income, Net – Interest and other income, net increased to $160 million in the fourth quarter of 2010, compared to $88 million in the fourth quarter of 2009.
Income Taxes – Our effective tax rate was 19% for the fourth quarter of 2010.
Net Income – GAAP net income in the fourth quarter of 2010 was $2.54 billion, compared to $1.97 billion in the fourth quarter of 2009. Non-GAAP net income was $2.85 billion in the fourth quarter of 2010, compared to $2.19 billion in the fourth quarter of 2009. GAAP EPS in the fourth quarter of 2010 was $7.81 on 326 million diluted shares outstanding, compared to $6.13 in the fourth quarter of 2009 on 322 million diluted shares outstanding. Non-GAAP EPS in the fourth quarter of 2010 was $8.75, compared to $6.79 in the fourth quarter of 2009.
Cash Flow and Capital Expenditures – Net cash provided by operating activities in the fourth quarter of 2010 totaled $3.53 billion, compared to $2.73 billion in the fourth quarter of 2009. In the fourth quarter of 2010, capital expenditures were $2.55 billion, which was primarily related to the purchase of our office building in New York City, as well as IT infrastructure investments, including data centers, servers, and networking equipment. Free cash flow, an alternative non-GAAP measure of liquidity, is defined as net cash provided by operating activities less capital expenditures. In the fourth quarter of 2010, free cash flow was $981 million.
We expect to continue to make significant capital expenditures.
A reconciliation of free cash flow to net cash provided by operating activities, the GAAP measure of liquidity, is included at the end of this release.
Cash – As of December 31, 2010, cash, cash equivalents, and marketable securities were $35.0 billion.
Headcount – On a worldwide basis, Google employed 24,400 full-time employees as of December 31, 2010, up from 23,331 full-time employees as of September 30, 2010.
A live audio webcast of Google's fourth quarter and fiscal year 2010 earnings release call will be available at http://investor.google.com/webcast.html. The call begins today at 1:30 PM (PT) / 4:30 PM (ET). This press release, the financial tables, as well as other supplemental information including the reconciliations of certain non-GAAP measures to their nearest comparable GAAP measures, are also available on that site.
This press release contains forward-looking statements that involve risks and uncertainties. These statements include statements regarding our continued investments in our core areas of strategic focus, our expected stock-based compensation charges, and our plans to make significant capital expenditures. Actual results may differ materially from the results predicted, and reported results should not be considered as an indication of future performance. The potential risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ from the results predicted include, among others, unforeseen changes in our hiring patterns and our need to expend capital to accommodate the growth of the business, as well as those risks and uncertainties included under the captions "Risk Factors" and "Management's Discussion and Analysis of Financial Condition and Results of Operations" in our Annual Report on Form 10-K for the year ended December 31, 2009, and our most recent Quarterly Report on Form 10-Q for the quarter ended September 30, 2010, which are on file with the SEC, and are available on our investor relations website at investor.google.com and on the SEC website at www.sec.gov. Additional information will also be set forth in our Annual Report on Form 10-K for the year ended December 31, 2010, which we expect to file with the SEC in February 2011. All information provided in this release and in the attachments is as of January 20, 2011, and Google undertakes no duty to update this information.
To supplement our consolidated financial statements, which statements are prepared and presented in accordance with GAAP, we use the following non-GAAP financial measures: non-GAAP operating income, non-GAAP operating margin, non-GAAP net income, non-GAAP EPS, and free cash flow. The presentation of this financial information is not intended to be considered in isolation or as a substitute for, or superior to, the financial information prepared and presented in accordance with GAAP. For more information on these non-GAAP financial measures, please see the tables captioned "Reconciliations of non-GAAP results of operations measures to the nearest comparable GAAP measures" and "Reconciliation from net cash provided by operating activities to free cash flow" included at the end of this release.
We use these non-GAAP financial measures for financial and operational decision making and as a means to evaluate period-to-period comparisons. Our management believes that these non-GAAP financial measures provide meaningful supplemental information regarding our performance and liquidity by excluding certain expenses and expenditures that may not be indicative of our "recurring core business operating results," meaning our operating performance excluding not only non-cash charges, such as stock-based compensation, but also discrete cash charges that are infrequent in nature. We believe that both management and investors benefit from referring to these non-GAAP financial measures in assessing our performance and when planning, forecasting, and analyzing future periods. These non-GAAP financial measures also facilitate management's internal comparisons to our historical performance and liquidity as well as comparisons to our competitors' operating results. We believe these non-GAAP financial measures are useful to investors both because (1) they allow for greater transparency with respect to key metrics used by management in its financial and operational decision making and (2) they are used by our institutional investors and the analyst community to help them analyze the health of our business.
Non-GAAP operating income and operating margin. We define non-GAAP operating income as operating income plus stock-based compensation. Non-GAAP operating margin is defined as non-GAAP operating income divided by revenues. Google considers these non-GAAP financial measures to be useful metrics for management and investors because they exclude the effect of stock-based compensation so that Google's management and investors can compare Google's recurring core business operating results over multiple periods. Because of varying available valuation methodologies, subjective assumptions and the variety of award types that companies can use under ASC Topic 718, Google's management believes that providing a non-GAAP financial measure that excludes stock-based compensation allows investors to make meaningful comparisons between Google's recurring core business operating results and those of other companies, as well as providing Google's management with an important tool for financial and operational decision making and for evaluating Google's own recurring core business operating results over different periods of time. There are a number of limitations related to the use of non-GAAP operating income versus operating income calculated in accordance with GAAP. First, non-GAAP operating income excludes some costs, namely, stock-based compensation, that are recurring. Stock-based compensation has been and will continue to be for the foreseeable future a significant recurring expense in Google's business. Second, stock-based compensation is an important part of our employees' compensation and impacts their performance. Third, the components of the costs that we exclude in our calculation of non-GAAP operating income may differ from the components that our peer companies exclude when they report their results of operations. Management compensates for these limitations by providing specific information regarding the GAAP amounts excluded from non-GAAP operating income and evaluating non-GAAP operating income together with operating income calculated in accordance with GAAP.
Non-GAAP net income and EPS. We define non-GAAP net income as net income plus stock-based compensation less the related tax effects. We define non-GAAP EPS as non-GAAP net income divided by the weighted average outstanding shares, on a fully-diluted basis. We consider these non-GAAP financial measures to be a useful metric for management and investors for the same reasons that Google uses non-GAAP operating income and non-GAAP operating margin. However, in order to provide a complete picture of our recurring core business operating results, we exclude from non-GAAP net income and non-GAAP EPS the tax effects associated with stock-based compensation. Without excluding these tax effects, investors would only see the gross effect that excluding these expenses had on our operating results. The same limitations described above regarding Google's use of non-GAAP operating income and non-GAAP operating margin apply to our use of non-GAAP net income and non-GAAP EPS. Management compensates for these limitations by providing specific information regarding the GAAP amounts excluded from non-GAAP net income and non-GAAP EPS and evaluating non-GAAP net income and non-GAAP EPS together with net income and EPS calculated in accordance with GAAP.
Free cash flow. We define free cash flow as net cash provided by operating activities minus capital expenditures. We consider free cash flow to be a liquidity measure that provides useful information to management and investors about the amount of cash generated by the business that, after the acquisition of property and equipment, including information technology infrastructure and land and buildings, can be used for strategic opportunities, including investing in our business, making strategic acquisitions, and strengthening the balance sheet. Analysis of free cash flow also facilitates management's comparisons of our operating results to competitors' operating results. A limitation of using free cash flow versus the GAAP measure of net cash provided by operating activities as a means for evaluating Google is that free cash flow does not represent the total increase or decrease in the cash balance from operations for the period because it excludes cash used for capital expenditures during the period. Our management compensates for this limitation by providing information about our capital expenditures on the face of the cash flow statement and under the caption "Management's Discussion and Analysis of Financial Condition and Results of Operations" in our Quarterly Report on Form 10-Q and Annual Report on Form 10-K. Google has computed free cash flow using the same consistent method from quarter to quarter and year to year.
The accompanying tables have more details on the GAAP financial measures that are most directly comparable to non-GAAP financial measures and the related reconciliations between these financial measures.
Google announced a new Google Maps feature today, related to the company's
recently launched Hotpot social recommendation product. Now, users can search
Google Maps, and request results based on the recommendations of specific
friends.
"Most of us know lots of friends, each with very different areas of expertise
when it comes to places to recommend. With the recent launch of Hotpot, we made
it easy for you to see your friends’ ratings and reviews listed right inside
search results,"
says Hotpot engineer Daniel Yehuda.
"While this is really helpful, and we've had a lot of fun with it, we often
found ourselves wanting to see all recommendations by a particular friend for a
particular search. Problem solved..."
"Say I'm searching on Google Maps for 'italian restaurants' in New York," Yehuda
explains. "I'd probably trust my buddy Octavian’s recommendations over
Bernhard’s (who is more of a hamburger guy, really). Now all I have to do, to
see Octavian’s entire list of Italian restaurant recommendations in the city, is
click on his name when he pops up in my initial search; this filters my search
results to only those he’s rated and shows them on the map. It’s like I’m seeing
the world, through Octavian’s eyes."
The feature is available for the desktop version of Google Maps, as well as the
Android version.
Now, it's going to help if your friends are actually rating restaurants using
Hotpot. There's probably a good chance that they're not, and the feature isn't
going to be incredibly useful without your friends. It remains to be seen just
how big Google will be able to take Hotpot, but there's no question the company
is putting a great deal of focus on it these days.
In fact, Google is putting a great deal of emphasis on local search in general,
and with Marissa Mayer (who until recently was Google's VP of search products
and user experience) running the show in this area, it's not hard to see a
product like Hotpot gaining some steam.
·
Google TV Goes to School
Google has announced a program called Google TV for EDU, which is described as a
seeding program to support university research. Google essentially gives Google
TV devices (Logitech Revues) to university faculty for the purpose of carrying
out in-classroom research.
The Google TV team has been working with Google's Student Ambassador Program and
University Programs to give students and faculty around the country access to
Google TV.
"This initiative began last semester when Google Student Ambassadors hosted
Google TV study breaks on over thirty campuses,"
explains product marketing manager
Miriam Schneider. "The ambassadors had students compete to win Sony Internet TVs
for their friends and school. They hosted pizza breaks, tech challenges, YouTube
marathons and of course, college football viewing parties. The top seven most
creative study breaks won two Sony Internet TVs to give back to their college as
a reward for their school spirit and enthusiasm for Google TV."
"The momentum from the Google TV study breaks has carried over into the
classroom," says Schneider. "Already, the web on TV has proven itself as a great
platform for early education and reading skills with web apps like PBS Kids and
Meegenius. However, professors have expressed interest in expanding these
opportunities to all levels of learning."
Google says it is asking faculty how their research could generate new interest
in TV engineering, make computer science tangible for students, help in the
development of smart TV curricula/new education tools, contribute to
in-classroom/distance learning over TV, and/or reach a wide audience.
AdAge published
an article that sent ripples throughout
the blogosphere with some questionable information. While not the basis of the
article (that was mainly about how Facebook has become a dominant force in
advertising), the article suggested that "the third-biggest advertiser [on
Facebook] was a completely unknown brand called Make-My-Baby.com, citing "ComScore's
third-quarter analysis."
As more information has surfaced throughout the day, we've learned that comScore
claimed (in an
email to Danny Sullivan) that
"Make-my-baby was not one of the top advertisers on Facebook." It remains
unclear whether comScore was just initially wrong and AdAge passed on the wrong
info, or whether the inaccuracy started with AdAge.
Brandon McCormick, a spokesperson for Facebook itself, tells WebProNews, "Not
only is make-my-baby.com not one of our largest advertisers, they are not an
advertiser at all. In fact, their practices are against our ad policies and
would be rejected as a result. This is true whether they tried to run ads with
us or an affiliate did."
So let's back up for a minute. The practices referred to, which are the
practices that made this a compelling story from the get go, were that make-my-baby.com
was forcing users to install a toolbar that switched their default search to
Bing, as the site was apparently run by a company trying to capitalize on a
Microsoft affiliate program.
Google's Matt Cutts, who discovered the practice and wrote about it on Google
Buzz last night, noted that he was quickly able to find additional sites that
were doing the same thing. All of this led to us
questioning how much of this was
actually taking place, and whether it could be playing a role in Bing's
impressive growth. I think this is still a valid question, but there is a pretty
big difference between such a site being one of the top advertisers on the
world's largest social network (with 1.75 billion impressions, as reported by
AdAge), and not advertising on Facebook at all. That greatly changes things in
terms of reach.
While it was never my intent to suggest that Bing owed its impressive growth
entirely to sites like this, it seemed possible that it could at least be
padded to some extent, and could still be even if to a much, much lesser
extent.
Either way, the whole thing appears to have worked out for the best, as a
Microsoft spokesperson told us, "Distribution deals and affiliate programs are
an important part of how all search engines introduce their product to
customers. That said, we have been made aware of some practices from a specific
publisher that are not compliant with the guidelines, best practices and
principles put in place by Bing. As a result, the relationship with this
publisher will be terminated."
Update: Sullivan
was
sent a copy of the comScore report by
AdAge. Apparently the confusion stemmed from make-my-baby.com being listed as
the third largest adertiser in social networking, based on comScore's
information - a category, which was comprised of Facebook, MySpace, and other
social networking sites). So while the site may not have been a big advertiser
on Facebook, it would appear that it was still a big social media advertiser -
and still a problem.
Article updated. See below. I have also
posted a new piece based on new
information that has come to light.
Facebook took in an estimated $1.86 billion in advertising revenue last year,
according to
eMarketer, and
AdvertisingAge says that the top two
advertisers were AT&T and Match.com. Google was number five.
It is the third-largest advertiser on Facebook, however, that has raised a few
eyebrows, including those of Google's Matt Cutts. The advertiser is something
called make-my-baby.com - not a well-known brand that you'd expect to see in the
top three.
Update:
Danny Sullivan at SearchEngineLand
writes: "An
Ad Age article suggests that Make-My-Baby is Facebook’s third largest
advertiser, based on a comScore report. But comScore tells me this isn’t so."
That certainly changes things, but it is still unclear where the confusion
stems from, and it doesn't really change what is happening, even if the ads
aren't being shown on as large a scale as initially thought (reports stemming
from that AdAge piece have make-my-baby.com, which has now been taken down,
buying 1.75 billion ad impressions in the third quarter alone).
Have
you been to any sites lately that urged you to install a browser plug-in
changing you default search?
Let us know.
Cutts, the head of Google's webspam team, said the following in
a Google Buzz update early this morning
(via Marshall Kirkpatrick, who has
an interesting write-up of the
situation):
Visiting make-my-baby.com instantly
prompts you to install a browser plugin. The "terms and conditions" link takes
you to http://mmb.bingstart.com/terms/ which has phrases like "If Chrome ("CR")
is installed on your PC we may change the default setting of your home page on
CR to Bingstart.com."
I also noticed this phrase in the Zugo
toolbar section: "To uninstall the Toolbar, please visit the Toolbar FAQ (
http://www.zugo.com/toolbar/faq/ )." Sadly, that url is a broken link. It looks
like a few people have had trouble uninstalling the Bing/Zugo toolbar, according
to pages like http://support.mozilla.com/en-US/questions/746034 or http://mymountain.blogspot.com/2010/03/how-to-remove-bingzugo-toolbar-hijack.html
If make-my-baby.com is Facebook's 3rd
biggest advertiser, I wonder how many people are installing this software
without reading the fine print that says "Installing the toolbar includes
managing the browser default search settings and setting your homepage to
bing.com" ?
The toolbar comes from a company called Zugo (as Cutts mentioned), which is
apparently an affiliate company trying to drive traffic to Bing so it can make
some money from Microsoft. After some discussion about the find, Cutts also
says, "It's entirely possible, even likely, that FB and MSFT didn't realize this
was going on. I wouldn't assume they were aware of what was going on."
Update: We've now
received comment from a Microsoft spokesperson, who tells us:
"Distribution deals and affiliate programs are an important part of how all search engines introduce their product to customers. That said, we have been made aware of some practices that are in conflict with Bing's principles and are addressing them directly with this affiliate partner."
Update 2: We've now received an updated comment from a Microsoft spokesperson, which now says:
"Distribution deals and affiliate programs are an important part of how all search engines introduce their product to customers. That said, we have been made aware of some practices from a specific publisher that are not compliant with the guidelines, best practices and principles put in place by Bing. As a result, the relationship with this publisher will be terminated."
Update 3:
We finally received comment from Facebook, and this one definitely changes
things. Facebook's Brandon McCormick tells us, "Not only is make-my-baby.com not
one of our largest advertisers, they are not an advertiser at all. In fact,
their practices are against our ad policies and would be rejected as a result.
This is true whether they tried to run ads with us or an affiliate did."
It would appear AdAge got some bad info, that set this whole chain of events
into motion. I will be posting another piece on this with more clarification.
One has to wonder how much of Bing's growth can be attributed to practices like
this. It might not be a substantial amount, but on the other hand...third
largest advertiser on Facebook? And this is just one example of a site like
this. It didn't take Cutts long to find several more with a quick search.
There's no telling how many site like this are actually out there.
"It's pretty remarkable that even at the top of this giant success story of
Facebook advertising, and perhaps near the top of the story of Bing's steady
rise as a search engine, is a Web 1.0-style pulling the wool over the eyes of
gullible internet users," says Kirkpatrick.
Bing's share of the search market rose from 11.8% to 12.0% from November to
December,
according to comScore numbers released last week.
It's worth noting, as mentioned by a commenter in the Buzz conversation, that
Cutts broke this story using Google Buzz, which goes to show - it doesn't matter
if the site is called Twitter, Quora, or Google Buzz - if there is interesting
content there, it's got to have some value.
Webspam in a growing problem.
Watch our exclusive interview with Blekko CEO Rich
Skrenta, who talks about the trend.
Update: Sullivan
was sent
a copy of the comScore report by AdAge. Apparently the confusion
stemmed from make-my-baby.com being listed as the third largest adertiser in
social networking, based on comScore's information - a category, which was
comprised of Facebook, MySpace, and other social networking sites). So while the
site may not have been a big advertiser on Facebook, it would appear that it was
still a big social media advertiser - and still a problem.
SEE NEW
PIECE ON TOPIC WITH UPDATED INFO.
U.S. paid search made solid gains in 2010 with 18.5 percent growth
year-over-year, according to a new report from SearchIgnite.
The fourth quarter (Q4) showed strong growth, increasing 35.5 percent YoY with
December leading the quarter at 44.8 percent YoY growth. The Q4 holiday season
indicated improved consumer sentiment, with the average order value (AOV) up
31.3 percent YoY compared to a 13 percent decrease in 2009.
“2010 proved to be a great year for search advertising as the search market
recovered from the downturn,” said Roger Barnette, CEO of
SearchIgnite.
“Even more promising is the revival of consumer spend throughout the year and
the strength of Average Order Values in Q4. We expect 2011 to be a strong year
for search and online advertising overall.”
Other findings in the report include:
*Retail saw significant increases in search spend in Q4 (up 36.6% YoY)
*All other underlying metrics in Q4 show positive results with 20.6% YoY
increase in clicks, 2.3% YoY increase in impressions and 17.9% YoY increase in
click-through rates.
*Google's share of advertising spend in Q4 increased to 82.6%, up from 80.2% in
Q3. Yahoo/Bing accounted for 17.4% of Q4 spend.
European flight search provider
Skyscanner has acquired UK travel
startup
Zoombu, which only launched its own
travel search site last year (the company started in 2008).
Zoombu was founded by Rachel Armitage and Dr. Alistair Hann, who have moved into
key roles at Skyscanner. With Zoombu, their goal was to provide multiple
transport options in a single search.
"As travellers ourselves we recognise that there are more ways to get around
than flights only," said Skyscanner CEO Gareth Williams. "Covering other travel
options on the Skyscanner site is something we've wanted to do from the start,
but air travel is a complex area and we wanted to get that right before
expanding into other transport options. Zoombu is an ideal fit for Skyscanner.
We really like the Zoombu team – they, and the technology, are very impressive
and we're delighted they’re joining us."
"Rail travel will be the first area that Skyscanner focuses on following the
Zoombu acquisition," Williams added. "With increasing investment being made in
rail infrastructure in Europe and worldwide, train travel is the immediate
priority for us and we aim to launch this on the site in the spring."
"This is a very exciting move for the Zoombu team," said Armitage. "Our
strengths lie in the product and technology development. By combining forces
with such an established and respected online travel search company we get a
fast track route to bringing our vision of a better search experience to a vast
user base. We’ve always had a lot of admiration for the Skyscanner product and
the team behind it and we are really looking forward to the opportunities
ahead."
The Zoombu team has won multiple awards in the travel industry, such as Eye for
Travel's Best Start-up in 2009, The University of Oxford's Saďd Business School
Venture Fund 2009 Winner, the Travel Trade Gazette Big Idea finalist 2009; and
Finalist at Seedcamp 2008. The company also made it to the final 5 (out of 1,500
businesses) in the Amazon Web Services Start-up Challenge 2010.
Financial terms of the acquisition have not been disclosed.
Bing announced some special features for the Golden Globes, for those who are
unable to watch the ceremony this evening. One feature is called
Golden Globe Instant Answer, and is
essentially what its name implies.
You can search Bing for "Golden Globes" and get an instant answer at the top of
the results, showing relevant content. Here you can see nominees, past winners,
etc.
Another feature, Golden Globe Visual Search Gallery, lets you check out nominees in all the different categories visually. "Whether you’re looking for 'best original score' or 'best motion picture', you can sort by category in a matter of clicks," says the Bing team.
Microsoft also has a Golden Globes guide that you can check out to catch up. "To
help prime you for the ceremony,
MSN Entertainment has created a guide
for the event with comprehensive coverage on the nominees, red carpet coverage
from the event, photos and videos of the stars and even the latest celebrity
news," the Bing team says.
The content will of course be updated as the ceremony goes on and afterwards, so
if you can't watch it, but are interested in the results, this should be a good
place to find what you're looking for.
Granted, the results will no doubt be all over Twitter, Facebook, Google, and
everywhere else on the web.
Some Google AdWords advertisers are not pleased with what they are finding in
Google's Search Query Performance reports
for their campaigns. These reports show advertisers what keyword queries are
surfacing their ads, and some are finding some of these keywords questionable.
Are
you losing money on clicks from questionable keywords?
Let us know.
You might think that an ad impression is an ad impression, but when you're
charged by the click, you want the clicks to come from people who are likely to
buy what you're selling, considering that you are paying Google for each click.
A Wall Street Journal piece has
put the spotlight on some of these advertisers,
including a New York dentist who claims irrelevant keywords have cost him nearly
$3,000 over the last year or so. The problem allegedly stems from Google's
session-based broad match feature, which shows ads to users not only for a
single query, but also for subsequent queries in the users same search session.
Google
explains the feature in the AdWords Help
Center:
"When determining which ads to show on
a Google search result page, the AdWords system evaluates some of the user's
previous queries during their search session as well as the current search
query. If the system detects a relationship, it will show ads related to these
other queries, too."
"The system considers the previous
queries in order to better understand the intent of the user's current query.
The added information allows the system to deliver more relevant ads."
"This feature is an enhancement of
broad match. It works by generating similar terms for each search query based on
the content of the current query and, if deemed relevant, the previous queries
in a user's search session. Your ad will potentially show if one of your
broad-matched keywords matches any of these similar terms."
Sounds good in theory, but the advertisers complaining appear to disagree with
what Google is considering to be relevant. The dentist from the WSJ story cited
"penis enlargement" and "[Chinese characters] in Chinatown" as examples – not
exactly dentist-related. The story also cites a plastic surgeon, who counted "olivia
newton john photos" among questionable keywords.
The WSJ spoke with Google's Nick Fox:
Mr. Fox acknowledged there are "edge" cases in which search queries "does not
appear to be relevant to the ads, but the context of previous queries indicated
that the user would have a strong interest in that advertisers' ad." In
addition, he said, "a user must be interested enough in an ad to want to click
on it." He said a very small percentage of ad clicks are session-based and that
advertisers can limit the scope of their campaign to halt session-based clicks.
Google's Mr. Fox said: "It has to be
the case that the users, in the very recent history, searched for terms he's
advertising on."
It's worth noting that Google says that whenever an ad is served based on the
associated keyword's relevance to the previous search queries, the ad's
performance has no effect on that keyword's Quality Score.
It's also worth noting that not everyone is unhappy with the session-based
clicks. Jordan McClements, commenting on
a Clixmarketing post on session-based broad match
says, "If you are in a niche where there is not much search traffic, and a new
client/sale is worth a lot of money to you then it is probably a good idea to
keep all your 'broad' options open."
John Lee, who wrote that post, says, "I want advertisers to be aware that in the
case of session-based broad match – you can't turn it off. My recommendation is
to remain vigilant in reporting, primarily with Search Query Reports to ensure
that the session-based query matches that do come through are relevant. If they
aren't, roll that knowledge (and those queries) into your negative keyword
lists."
Probably good advice.
Perhaps the real question is how much of the problem is Google and how much is
the advertiser?
Speaking of negative keywords, Google actually just
released a new feature this week to
manage negative keywords across multiple campaigns with negative keyword lists.
Have you wasted money on
irrelevant session-based clicks?
Google will be changing the way display URLs look in AdWords ads in the next
week or so. The domain portion of the display URL will always be showing in
lowercase letters. For example, Subdomain.Example.com/Subdirectory will appear
as subdomain.example.com/Subdirectory. Google suggests that the move can
actually boost clickthrough rates.
"In any given month, we experiment with hundreds of subtle variations of the
Google search results page, testing everything from font sizes and colors to
layouts and spacing, as well as dozens of other variables,"
says Lisa Shieh of Google's Inside
AdWords Crew. "Recently, we found that by standardizing the look of the URLs on
the page, we were able to improve many of our user metrics, including ad
clickthrough rates."
"As you've probably figured out by now, we believe that regular website testing
is the best way to ensure an optimal user experience, and we encourage you to
test variations of your own website," she says.
More specifically, Google suggests using its own
Website Optimizer tool for such
testing.
Advertisers need not worry about editing their own ads. Uppercase letters in
display URL domains will automatically be changed to lowercase when the change
goes into effect.
Google also introduced a new way to manage negative keywords across multiple
campaigns in negative keywords lists.
With the lists, advertisers can manage groups of negative keywords in their
account's Control Panel and Library, and associate them with multiple
campaigns.
"For example, say you have a set of negative keywords you always add to any
campaign running on the Search Network,"
explains Google's Dan Friedman.
"Previously, you'd need to copy that set to every new search campaign you
created in your account. Now, with shared lists, you can simply create a single
negative keyword list and associate it with each search campaign. If there’s a
new negative keyword you’d like to add to all of those campaigns, just add it to
your list and it will automatically update across each campaign. Similarly, if
you create a new campaign, you can add your negative keyword list to exclude all
of the necessary terms with just a few clicks."
·
Is New Ask Feature a Response to Growing Interest in Quora?
Ask announced today that it is rolling out the ability to personalize the Q&A
experience, which has become the core focus of the site.
Ask users can use the "Browse by Interests" tab to view questions/answers
(content) that are relevant to them, which should make the experience a great
deal more useful.
"This personalized experience is part of our larger vision for what Ask.com Q&A
is about"
says Director of Product Management
Jason Rupp. "First, if the answer already exists on the Web and you can get it
in milliseconds without bugging a single person, we should give it to you.
Second, if you do need a person to answer, we should optimize the chances of you
getting a high quality answer – quickly – as well as make it easy and fun to ask
subsequent questions."
"From a feature standpoint, that means things like intelligent routing so your
question is delivered to the people most qualified to answer it first," adds
Rupp. "The ability to follow people who consistently provide highly relevant
questions and answers on the site also helps you customize your experience. And
now, the ability to filter your experience to reflect the questions and answers
most pertinent to your life takes that one step further."
Another Q&A site called
Quora has been getting a great deal of
attention lately, and one of its features is the ability to follow topics as
well as people. This new feature would appear to be following this concept, but
Ask's feature lets users grab profile info from other social networks like
Facebook or LinkedIn to personalize the Interests they're following.
The biggest draw to Quora thus far has been the
quality of the content - the caliber of
people answering the questions. CEOs and other company executives, for example,
have been answering questions, providing authoritative information.
As with any site, the quality of Ask's new features will only be as good as the
content that is available. Part of that is up to the user and what they choose
to follow. Given that Ask is looking to the web (not just people) for answers,
it should be pretty useful.
Bing has added a new feature to its search results in enhanced auto results,
which show information about automobiles right on the search results pages.
The Bing Team writes:
Now you can search for your favorite
car and Bing will assemble all of the important information (price, Fuel
Economy, user rating, listings in your area) as well as quick links to
additional information right within the search result.
Simply enter in the make and model and
Bing autos will pull together everything you need to research in one place. You
use the filters in the left rail to narrow down your search by model, price,
year or comparable vehicle.
You can see the feature in action in a video shown
here, or you can simply go to Bing and
try it out. I find that for some queries, you have to add a year to get the
results to come up immediately, though if you leave it off, you can still get to
the results by clicking one of the options (which contains a year) in the left
rail.
The feature is in line with other recently launched Bing features, such as those
for
sports tickets and
TV listings. The feature really falls in
line with Bing's whole "Decision Engine" philosophy it launched with from the
beginning - providing answers directly in search results without providing the
need to click through to other sites to get the info.
The auto results provide info from
MSN Autos, and when you click through on
the links within these results, that is where you will be taken.