If you have every managed a campaign on Google AdWords, you will have come across a little button which asks you whether you would like your ads to display on ‘all devices’ or have the option of deselecting ‘mobile browsers’. Have you ever considered the real implications of choosing yes or no to mobile browsers?

The world of mobile browsing is a very different kettle of fish to what we see in the home or office. Whilst in the desktop browser war Mozilla Firefox and Internet Explorer dominate, we see two alternative browsers taking the top positions. Apple’s Mobile Safari, which runs on the iPhone and iPod Touch, competes head-to-head with Opera Mini, the mobile version of the Opera browser. Statistics vary, but these two browsers remain clear leaders, with Apple being the winner when numbers for the iPod Touch and iPhone are combined - view here.

Opera Mini by default, uses Google search, and Apple itself, though not the biggest fan of Google at times, integrates some Google products in it’s iPhone/Touch offerings. In October 2009 Opera Mini just about hit the 40 million user mark, which is an impressive number. According to sources this has helped Google achieve well over 90% of the mobile search engine market share, much higher than on desktops - view here and another source here.

Change is afoot and both Apple and Opera will need to step up their games in the next few years. Mozilla is coming to the party soon, Fennec, the codename for the mobile version of Firefox, is just over the horizon, with a stable 1.0 release on the way. Firefox has developed a strong user base in the desktop market over time and a mobile version of the browser might do the same thing on portable platforms.

Chrome OS is however, also on the way, and there is already talk that Chrome OS and Android will merge. Developed for mobile devices by Google, Android is an open source operating system that has none of the constraints enforced by Apple, who place limitations on what is sold at their App Store for example. Though having a slow initial uptake, there are already predictions that Android will overtake the iPhone in coming years - read more here. For current mobile metrics data relating to Android uptake read more at AdMob here. There is already integration of Google Maps in Android, making the purchase of a GPS redundant, whilst the official Google Mobile Blog continues rolling out new ideas, features and updates. So, with a tightly integrated, free and open source operating system available for various platforms an Android/Chrome OS combination could put a spanner in the works for Apple.

This can only mean good things for Google, though Mobile Safari and Opera Mini use some Google features, they lack the full integration of Android or Chrome OS with Google services. More mobile platforms switching to a Google OS will mean many more Google specific pageviews and hence more places to display advertisements. Though Apple is assured of continued market share, Google seems to be slowly chipping away at the foundations, and looks to hold a much more significant mobile user base, not just in mobile search, in the future.

Just before for the peak shopping days of the year Google released a new feature called Ad parameters. This feature, which was initially know as Live Ads enables advertisers to update numeric fields in their ad copy without actually deleting the existing ad and creating a new one (which is how the standard Adwords ad editing works under the hood). So why is this such a big deal?

Well it is very important for performance driven marketers since previously every time they updated an ad they would:

a. Have the new ad go through a review process again which could delay the campaign

b. lose the Quality Score and performance history related to that ad copy

With the new ad parameters, one can write really compelling ad copy highlighting real time pricing and stock levels without losing the ad performance history which is perfect for aggressive marketing.
There are however two important caveats to using this issue that affect a lot of advertisers:

1. Your product data needs to be up to date, i.e. don’t advertise a price or product that is not on your site or you will get plenty of dissatisfied customers. Sure, this sounds like common sense, but you would be surprised how many companies cannot provide this functionality

2. If your campaign is overly reliant on broad match terms (as more and more companies seem to do these days) you cannot control which ad is shown next to a search term. In effect, by having the wrong ad displayed you might actually be harming your campaign more than by showing a very generic, less targeted ad.

At the moment, Google is only releasing this feature via the API which means the people using it should be technically able to also use it correctly.

Clicks2Customers have been using this feature for a few retailers and the results are very promising, especially when the retailer is able to compete on price, and responds quickly to his competitors’ prices.
Updating tens of thousands of ad copies with cut throat live pricing has proven to lift CTR and CVR significantly. It will give an even bigger edge to savvy marketers, which is why we like it so much.

It has been a very, very busy time for the folks over at Google lately. The much hyped Google Wave is open to a few lucky individuals who got invitations (read more about it at Wikipedia here) and is set to revolutionize the way we communicate online. Not only that, the Google Wave interface is reported to possibly be rolled out to all Google Apps, read more at Engadget here.

That’s just about it right? Well, no… Google appears to be in the process of stockpiling at the moment. Along with Wave, the next-generation of Google search, aka Caffeine, may be just over the horizon. Designed to integrate more tightly with social networking, and apparently twice as fast and more accurate, Caffeine is set to change the way we search. There is a detailed test of Caffeine at Mashable here. Google also just purchased AdMob, a mobile display advertising company, for $750 million. AdMob is one of the largest mobile advertising platforms in the world, claiming to serve more than 7 billion ads a month! You can read more about it at the official press release here.

Finished? Definitely not! They have also just acquired Gizmo5, which will most likely add the ability to make calls to Google Voice. They even decided to release a new programming language, simply called Go. There was also the announcement of a project called SPDY (SPeeDY), which is set to improve upon the current HTTP standard. Read more about SPDY at the Chromium Blog here. Page load time is set to become a more important part of the search results page (read more at Search Engine Land here), Chrome for Mac is set for a December Beta release and finally Google dropped the prices for their extra paid storage, giving you twice the storage for a quarter of the price!

What are all the pieces of the puzzle adding up to? In my mind, only one thing, the coming release of Google Chrome OS. There is one place in the market where Google is forever losing and though there have been many battles, Microsoft continues to bundle Internet Explorer as the primary (and only) browser with Windows. On my installation of Windows 7, if I open Internet Explorer where does my homepage land? Not on Google, I am rather directed to the MSN portal page with a Bing search box.

Google, earns it revenue through advertising, whilst Microsoft sells software. Every person who doesn’t use Google, is one less prospective customer and one less possible click for Google. The chances of Microsoft (unless legally forced to do so) bundling a competitor’s browser (namely Google Chrome) with Windows is just about zero. The only way for Google to gain ground is to do exactly what it is doing now, undermine the very basis of Microsoft’s domination - Windows. Chrome OS will be open source, hence as open source it will also be free. The lure of this is (especially) in the budget PC and netbook market where the additional price of Windows software adds a sizable chunk onto the price. With Google offering Chrome OS free, and if it is good, they already have one foot very firmly in the door. The integration of Chrome OS with the Google suite of applications and services will mean one thing, more places to display advertisements!

Is this the beginning of a battle of the titans? Will we in a few years time see Google having a large piece of the operating system market, which at the moment is almost completely dominated by Microsoft? Only time will tell, but I get the feeling something is afoot…

After using Google for so long we have become quite used to an almost ‘psychic’ search. You type in something and Google will return a match, even offering suggestions if you make a spelling mistake, and you generally find what you want quite easily.

This ‘comfort zone’ we have developed can however lead to problems, as the Google search algorithm is far superior to what is used internally on many sites. When finding landing pages on client’s sites we are often forced to use search queries. Issues arise when there are a large number of products, landing pages and hence keywords. Checking all these search terms can be a time consuming endeavor. So, often it is assumed the keyword will generate a good enough search on the client’s site, landing on an appropriate enough landing page without having to check thousands of queries.

If client’s sites all employed more predictive algorithms then this methodology for generating destination URLs would be fine. Realistically many client’s site DO NOT have this feature. Take a large car parts site for example, a search for “ford hubcaps” produces a results page with 7 ‘matches’ which include 1 hub cap remover, 3 sets of hub cap screws, and 3 other items, not exactly a well focused results page! Just by adding a space between ‘hub’ and ‘cap’, the search query will return 27 results that are much more focused…

A more glaring example of this would be a search with keyword “power windows” (implying automatic, electric car windows), which returns zero results, however if this keyword is ‘reverse engineered’ and the query is instead “electric window motor” the query returns 1,422 results!

So, next time you are dealing with a client that has a large site, and you intend using search queries as your destination URLs, be sure to either check the keywords before hand or research how predictive the site search algorithm is. It may not necessarily be true that your high traffic keyword list will automatically generate good landing pages on your client’s site, if the site search is not up to scratch! In a circumstance like this your click-through-rate might be great but your conversion rate might be less than expected, due to improper ‘engineering’ of search queries related to base keywords.

What is a GOOD example of predictive search? My favourite is CDUniverse whose internal site search I think is excellent.