Category: Google (GOOG)

Google (GOOG)

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Search Engine Strategies San Jose – Silicon Valley August 19-23

I look forward to seeing all of my wonderful search engine, mobile search and mobile advertising friends next week at Search Engine Strategies (SES) San Jose!  While I’ll definitely be in Mountain View for the Google Dance (hopefully they won’t run out of XL t-shirts in 2 minutes like last year), I’m unsure whether I’ll make it to Palo Alto, San Francisco, Sunnyvale, Oakland, Monterrey or Santa Cruz to visit and see some other awesome things. I do hope to make it to Barcamp Block.

Who else will be there and what spontaneous events, product launches and parties are you looking most forward to? I’m getting very close to some of my goals! I look forward to seeing you.

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adtech Chicago: Redefining Search to Realize Its Full Potential

August 1, 2007

MODERATOR:
Jeffrey Pruitt, President, SEMPO, and Executive VP, Search, iCrossing

PANELISTS:
Kelly Graziadei, Senior Director, Agency Development, Yahoo! Search Marketing

James Colborn, Group Marketing Manager, adCenter Communications Group, Microsoft

Kevin Willer, Central Region Development Manager, Google

James Colbourn, Microsoft

Kelly Graziadei, Yahoo!

Think about the many different faces of search.

– The Researcher – look at Yahoo! Buzz to create an audience pyramid. Look at other content. Miller Beer Run. Showed a campaign with getting the beer – Yahoo! created the game and got excellent results

– The Reputation Manager – geo-targeting, ad testing, etc. Jet Blue built a campaign to respond to negative news.

– The Brand Manager – 79% introduced to new brands in search and 61% expect brand leaders to be consistently in the top of search results.

– The Great Integrator – TV, web, games, mobile all at the same time.

– The Advocate – Searchers are advocates that build brands through social media – significant in the pre and post purchase mode.

Kevin Willer, Google
– Information silos in the past. You almost needed a search engine for the search engines. Now all the silos are in one universal search.

Google Promotion – search for Bourne – showed how the site with Youtube

Search for PR. – You need to be ready to answer those searches

Search the New Performance Link – showed Motorola example and Presidential campaign data for Hilary Clinton, Barack Obama, Giuliani, John McCain, Mitt Romney (He said the

We want to start thinking about search in different ways.

James Colbourn, Microsoft
Search Today: A Performance Tool
– To increase brand awareness
– To Sell Products
– To Generate Leads
– To Drive Traffic To Company Website

How do advertisers measure success?
– Traffic
– Conversions
– Impressions
– ROI

Brand, Awareness, Acquisition Tool and Lead Generator

Search as a research tool is a leading indicator for:
– A Business
– An Industry

Beyond Search
– Media Buying
– Budget Allocation
– PR Activity

The potential for search is higher than current usage…

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adtech Chicago: Search + Video + Contextual Targeting: Is the Holy Grail Upon Us?

July 31, 2007

Shashi Seth, Head of Monetization, YouTube.com

Rebecca Paoletti, Director, Video Strategy, Yahoo!

Patrick Moorhead, National Manager, R&D Advanced Marketing Solutions, Avenue A | Razorfish

Chris D’Alessandro, Group Director, Customer Insight, Organic, Inc.

Moderator: Curt Hecht, Executive VP, Chief Digital Officer, GM Planworks/Starcom Mediavest Group

Rebecca: Video search is not as important to core clients as media that is relevant to the brand. The off network piece is important as well. Reaching your users wherever they are, walking down the street, whatever…

Patrick: It’s almost the Holy Grail. We need to redefine contextual to mean what the user means at that moment.

Chris: If you are looking at an awareness company, it’s not the Holy Grail.

Curt: How does this scale? How are the agencies? Pre-rolls?

Rebecca: The trend to distribute us towards pre-roll. We are far away from dynamic video smart ads. What they search for. Dynamically delivered video is hard to deliver. Dynamic video is a long ways away.

Patrick: I disagree that we are far away from dynamically generated video.

Curt: Who is digging in on this?

Chris: Emerging and bleeding technology is getting there.

Curt: Are you talking about testing and learning?

Chris: Search is always part of everyone’s repertoire.

Rebecca: Shopping and merchandising makes a lot of sense. We have huge testing and learning going on right now.

Curt: Marketers will have to deal with versioning of creative.

Chris: we’ve had to segment sites. What kind of content do we deliver?

Patrick: We have to measure this stuff from an optimization of media dollars. The same investment can service a much broader audience. Campaign management tools will catch up at some point. Look at things holistically; it’s half about people management.

Shashi: Traditional click through and engagement numbers are not sufficient. We need to come up with standard metrics across the board.

Audience question on pre-rolls and potential attrition to smaller sites.

Shashi: When we announce our ad unit, we will take all those things into account.

Rebecca: We only use it for premium inventory. We balance the pre-roll with the length of the content. We’ve done a lot of testing in this area and found it had no adverse impact.

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Google News Hypocrisy: Walled Off Content

Techcrunch has a post that outlines a well thought out viewpoint on an issue regarding Google News.

Michael, as I posted the other day in my interview with Barry Schwartz on splogs, Google can wall it all it wants, the top portions are available via RSS. They should turn off the RSS feed too if they truly want to prevent all crawling. 🙂

I personally don’t enjoy some of the effects of comment fragmentation, but I don’t know if it will ever go away.

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Barry Schwartz Gives His Thoughts on Splogs with Adsense

During the August 2, 2007 edition of the DailySearchCast, Barry Schwartz and Danny Sullivan discussed Aaron Wall’s post, Catching a Thief Red Handed. Aaron discusses the problem of copied content (splogs) and then goes on to discuss his view in a great post on Google’s lack of respect for copyright. Danny says Aaron’s post starting winning him over. They are working to solve the Youtube problem, but when do they fix this for the web content issue? It’s the one that truly monetizes today. One wonders if this potential lack of trust could become a Google tipping point?

I noticed that Barry seemed passionate and/or somewhat frustrated so I offered to discuss it further via an interview, the results of which you see below.

Thanks for spending time with me today Barry, it seems that this issue of copied / script replicated generated content wrapped in Google Adsense gets you a bit worked up…

Barry: I guess I did. It is frustrating for any person who writes content to find other’s monetizing their content without permission or even credit. It doesn’t bother me like it once did, because the issue is a lot more widespread and automated than it once was. But during that conversation with Danny, I got a bit worked up on the topic.

If I understand correctly, each time you’ve interacted with Google about this, they always ask you to fill out DCMA request manually yourself?

Barry: Yes, that is correct. No matter how obvious it was, they requested I submit a DMCA request.

But you think that they could be more proactive on this issue with all of the data that they have available?

Barry: Yes, I do. Matt Cutts did comment that there is an easy way to report it. But it doesn’t seem to work. And if I tell my Google AdSense representative of an issue, the response should not be, “go file a DMCA request.”

Why not just forward your email to the Blogger Product Manager if the issue involves a Blogger blog?

Barry: Because I honestly do not have a Blogger product manager on hand!

Feedburner actually identifies what they term “uncommon uses” in their reporting but there is not yet a way to use this helpful information to unsubscribe this feed for this use or to automatically fill out DCMA with one click. Would this be a logical step? What else do you think Google should be doing to resolve this issue?

Barry: I would be very happy if AdSense had a form that you can easily get to, to report this stuff. It is actually pretty well hidden presently. A user must know that they can click on “Ads by Google” which then asks for ad relevancy feedback. At the bottom of that form it gives you a way to report “violations,” but it is not at the top of the page. Make it easier, clearer and quicker. I suggest adding this form to the Google AdSense console and make it clearer for non-AdSense publishers to report issues.

Looking at it from the searchers side, it is clear that splogs and other copied content is certainly not a good user experience…

Barry: Yes, that is clear.

What is your vision of the future solutions of these topics?

Barry: Remove splogs! I know it is hard. Make it easier to report these people and terminate their AdSense accounts and reduce the incentive to make a splog.

Maybe Google will take some action on these issues. Conversation to be continued…do you have strong thoughts on copied content? Please join the conversation!