When Google launched Chrome last week, I noticed a download link on its homepage. I didn’t think too much of it and assumed it was a launch stunt. But more than a week later, the link still occasionally appears. Given Google’s resistance to putting a privacy link on its home page, I wonder why they don’t seem to apply the same purity principle when it comes to promoting their own products? Or perhaps international versions of their homepage (which is where the links seem to appear) are considered to be experimental playgrounds?

And strangely enough, the link only seems to appear when I visit Google using Firefox, not when I use Opera (which is my preferred browser) . Is Google actively trying to poach users from Firefox because it knows Firefox users are more amendable to trying new browsers?

When the gorilla in the room develops a new web browser, you cant help but pay attention. That Google was working on a browser was not really a secret, they already hired a lead developer from Firefox nearly 3 years ago. Nevertheless the entry of Google into this market is bound to ruffle a few feathers.

I installed the Chrome Beta as soon as it was released, and I uninstalled it again within the hour for various reasons.

1. some sites I frequently visit didn’t work.
2. some sites only work if I am willing to accept all cookies (yeah right)
3. the functionality is a bare minimum, although this could be a positive in some cases
4. the incognito feature is cool, but i wish it could be my default setting

and lastly -call me paranoid- after installation Chrome listed as ‘recent bookmarks’ sites i last visited two years ago for a research project i was doing at time. I regularly remove private data from my computer (or so i thought) so i have no idea where chrome retrieved that information from. My Google account has browsing history disabled, so it shouldn’t have gotten it from there?

In fact, having Chrome record all my activities by default makes me uneasy. Think of it, even when you set your default search engine to e.g. Yahoo, Chrome (i.e. Google) still knows about your searches and the links you click.

Sure, every browser has that ability, but Google has a vested interest in actually using that information, unlike Firefox or Opera. Microsoft (IE) could use that data too, but I have faith in their inability to actually do something with it.

So basically it comes down to: how much information are you willing to give to a company whose aim is to index your life?

When Google introduced the concept of a minimum bid into the Adwords platform, I guess few advertisers and perhaps not even Google realized the effect it would have on their business.

Publicly, Google always maintains that relevance and user experience take priority over revenue generation and so the minimum bid was introduced to ensure that search engine users would not be bombarded with poor quality advertising. By raising the bar, Google forced advertisers to reconsider the ROI of their Adwords campaigns rather than spam the search results with ads by bidding en masse on cheap, non-commercial keywords in the hope of getting a few extra clicks.

Noble as the minimum was intended to be, most Adwords advertisers will be able to tell tales of being ‘slapped’ with minimum bids of up to $10 per click. Needless to say that very few businesses would be able to pay those prices and Google was never very forthcoming with a helpful explanation in order to lower them again.

On a bigger scale, the minimum bid also completely negated Google’s argument that it does not behave as a monopoly in the search engine advertising market. By setting a bottom, the free market auction for keywords becomes a whole lot less free and Google theoretically can tweak the minimum bids to squeeze the most out of its advertisers and boost its revenue. That is a factor the company cannot ignore as it keeps increasing market share and attracts ever greater scrutiny from governments and competitors.

By abandoning the minimum bid for a ‘first page’ bid Google hopefully will introduce again greater transparency into its advertising platform. More practically, Google’s move will reactivate a sizeable portion of ad inventory that currently sits dormant on its platform and give the company a boost in revenue in time for the upcoming holiday season.

So although as an advertiser we welcome the perishing of the opaque minimum bid, we will be keeping a close eye on our costs as a mass of previously inactive keywords comes back online.

(written by Nic, member of our adcopy team)

What do I want from Google? There is one thing that I have ALWAYS wanted for as long as I can remember and it is a simple little thing.

A RANDOMIZE BUTTON next to search results. Not the crumby “I’m Feeling Lucky” button that makes me think “I‘m Feeling Like Kicking Your…” instead when I search I want to be able to RANDOMIZE my results COMPLETELY. If I am doing research for something I don’t like combing pages and pages of links sorted by Google’s algorithm. To be honest I have little faith in the fact that the results are truly independent. Money makes the world go round and Google’s algorithms wouldn’t want to make a dent in the billions. So you get Google results.

I don’t disagree with this practice, they’re just looking after their own interests, HOWEVER, being able to randomize the results order for the same search phrase not only improves the depth of the current search (you view a variety of results that otherwise gets lost by a sorting algorithm) but also gives the proverbial ‘man on the street’ much more of a chance to show his stuff and I think it would improve research a lot.

I don’t think revenue would be lost as advertisements could still be displayed next to the search results - unless Google is using its algorithms to ’streamline’ the results order for its own financial benefit.

The fog of war has lifted from Yahoo: Microsoft has walked away, Yahoo claims victory and Google ends up with the spoils. In response to the failed Microsoft bid Yahoo announced a “Non-Exclusive Search Agreement” with Google. In short, this means that Yahoo will outsource a portion (whatever that means) of its search and display advertising business to Google in exchange for a lot of cash.

Some people seem to think this is a good deal but from a search marketer’s perspective, it is not. At first sight I would welcome a standard advertising platform that allows marketers to target specific search engines. But the terms of the deal are half-baked. Yahoo will not abandon its Panama platform in exchange for Adwords but do they really think advertisers are going to bother to use 2 different systems to achieve the same goal? I really can’t see that happening and unless Yahoo is prepared to over time outsource all its advertising to Google it should realise it just rolled in the Trojan horse.

The deal also stifles competition in the market even further. The Big Three (Google, Yahoo, MSN) have distinct characteristics and different users. Most marketers for instance will tell you that MSN has much better converting traffic than the other two and that Google is definitely the most expensive to advertise on. By effectively swallowing Yahoo, Google gives marketers even less choice of where to spend their budgets.

Perhaps, if Microsoft plays its cards right, it could gain something from this after all. Now that Yahoo has made itself irrelevant in terms of search advertising, marketers only need to distribute their budget between Google and MSN. A much easier decision to make than having to split a budget three ways.

Your thoughts?

At SMX advanced in Seattle the question was put to the attendees: “how many of you use bid management tools?”

And that was the most surprising part of the session: nearly everyone in a room with hundreds of people raised their hand. Of course technically speaking using Excel to increase your prices by 10% also makes it a bid management tool. Nevertheless people in the industry seem to take bid management really seriously - as they should. I couldn’t help shake the feeling though that the panelists conveniently touted all the wonders of bid management without touching on its many shortcomings. Only David Rodnitzky from PPCAdBuying.com played the devil’s advocate and warned against the dangers of being sold an expensive, complex system that may not actually offer a return on investment.

I have to agree with David that bid management tools often over-promise and under-deliver and for a very simple reason. bid management makes sense for large PPC campaigns where it is unwieldy to set prices manually. But it is exactly for those large campaigns that the data you have available for each keyword is very sparse. Long tail keywords may contribute a significant portion of your revenue but by their very nature each individual keyword gathers information in a fairly random manner. No matter how smart your bid management system, it cannot make assumptions from data that doesn’t exist. To get around that most system group long tail keywords in clusters and aggregate their data. How you cluster the data though will greatly influence of the system and as far as I know there is no one optimal way of doing it.

A comment made by search marketing veteran Kevin Lee (and with which other panelist Chris Zaharias from Omniture agrees in spirit) also illustrates another difficulty faced by automated bid management. Kevin said that half of the paid ads in top positions are put there by idiots, not rational beings. How would a bid management system incorporate the behaviour of an irrational market into its decision making algorithm?

When choosing a bid management system be careful not to over-complicate things. For small to midsized campaigns you probably don’t need any fancy systems. Choose a tool that is flexible and that lets you override its bid adjustments. That way you can control for events such as special promotions or sudden increased competition in the market. And remember, bid management tools are only an aid, not a solution.

Finally. That was my first thought when Microsoft announced the existence of an MSN Adcenter desktop tool at the SMX advanced conference this morning. We knew something like this was in the pipeline but never knew when it was supposed to become publicly available. Well now it is, almost. The tool will initially only be launched in a private beta so you better apply quickly if, like me, you dread working with the Adcenter web interface. In combination with with the other initiatives MSN has taken recently, such as their cash-back program and the deal to pre-install Live Search on all new HP computers, today’s announcement sends a strong message that Microsoft is determined to go after Google head on.

Google dominates the PPC market not just because it has the most users, but for a large part because it is so easy to advertise on its Adwords platform. But many advertisers don’t like Google’s grip on the market and are just waiting for an opportunity to move a larger part of their budget to alternative search engines. Hopefully Microsoft’s tool will facilitate this.

update: you can signup for the adcenter beta here  

Some merchants are still not convinced that they should be bidding on their own brand keywords when running a PPC campaign. I believe they should, but don’t take my word for it, take Google’s. When searching recently for some of Google’s applications, i noticed the following ad:

One could argue that it doesn’t cost Google anything to advertise on its own site but there is still an opportunity cost involved in not having someone else’s ad displayed there. Yet Google obviously thinks it is worth it because the ad stands out a lot more than the organic listing and they are able to control the message they convey to the user a lot better. When you are looking for a place to download Google talk, which link would you prefer?

If you are running PPC campaigns in the UK or Ireland and you’re a believer in open markets and healthy competition, you will love Google’s AdWords Trademark Policy Revision. However, as with most of Google’s recent changes, it will cost you.

The changes are nothing new to US advertisers, as Google has been allowing advertisers to bid on their competitor’s US trademarks since 2004 but the UK market up till now has enjoyed more protection.

Advertisers unsure how this will affect their PPC campaign can read up on a previous post on brand bidding but basically i foresee the following impact:

•  ’small’ companies will use this opportunity to aggressively start bidding on their competitors’ trademark in an attempt to gain market share
•  dominant advertisers will have to spend more money to defend their brand from their rivals.

The stronger your brand, the more you will be (negatively) affected by this change as well known trademarks are a big driver of traffic and others are going to want a piece of it. This is a time for UK advertisers to evaluate their PPC campaigns and their brand bidding policies. They last thing you want be is unprepared when the changes come into effect on May 5 2008.

And Google? They benefit because in all likelihood advertisers will spend more money on Adwords (although the official line is that they’re are just doing it for the sake of improving ‘relevancy’ to the user).

Ok, so i’ve completely thrown the idea of live blogging out of the window due to non-existing internet connectivity but i’ll be posting my notes one by one in the coming days…

Keynote day 3: Jason Calacanis from Mahalo.com

Jason has quite a reputation as an industry renegade, so I looked quite forward to his session. For those of you who don’t know Jason, his recent venture is a ‘human-powered’ search engine. So instead of relying on fancy algorithms like Google, Jason relies on human editing to provides searches with relevant results.

Jason started off by clarifying his stance on SEO, as he’s generally known as the guy who thinks SEO is ‘absolute BS’. He now said that as far as SEO is about building relevant, user-friendly sites, he’s all for it :).
Mahalo looks similar to the old directory sites (and which failed one by one) but Jason believes their failure was due to their decreasing quality content. Mahalo with its human editing weeds out bad content.

The problem with this concept is though that the amount of work increases as the number of pages on the site increases. Not only do new pages need to be added, but all pages need to be maintained. To solve that problem, Mahalo is creating community involvement (like Wikipedia) to reduce their workload. Mahalo users have an interest in keeping the contents clean and relevant.

Another benefit of Mahalo is that site owners have input in the content that is being displayed on the search engine, unlike at other search engines. I believe that is a major selling point for a lot of merchants and big brands, who feel disempowered by the ‘big three’ regarding the information that is indexed and served to search engine users. Mahalo’s role is limited to doing QA on the content that is being submitted (about 20% of the links submitted by website owners are accepted). Spam doesn’t exist on Mahalo because they have no way of making it into the index

An additional feature of Mahalo is that it tries to combine search with the social graph (i.e. your social connections). Mahalo users can see who referred their search results, find movies recommended by their friends, etc. To do this Mahalo interacts with a number of online social networking sites to aggregate your social connections. That said, Jason doesn’t always believe in asking permission before scraping content from other website. He says asking for forgives gets you further :).

Jason made a very good point saying that what search needs is less pages, not more. Think about it, most searches on google generate millions of results and hardly anyone ever looks past the top ten. The industry should go back to valuing quality of quantity.

Mahalo would best be suited for the ‘mid-tail’. Google and other engines are pretty good at serving the long tail and the short tail. Getting the middle ground right is more difficult according to Jason. That’s where the human element and the social element of search can add value.