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.

Yesterday, 28th July a new search engine was launched called Cuil.
The company claims that their search engine is the worlds biggest, having even more indexed pages that Google and Microsoft Live.

Much of the team responsible behind the creation and design of Cuil are ex-Google employees but the look-and-feel as well as functioning of the site unlike Google.

The ads on the site are on the left-hand side of the page, with a larger description text but still resembling the same format as used Google and Microsoft. When searching it provides more results at face, with similar search matches across a tab and well as categories to break down your search. The site is very responsive and quick but may be overwhelming to those used to Google’s minimalistic search engine.

The launch didn’t go completely as planned with various mishaps such as some popular search terms returning no results or an intermittent service.

Only time tell if this can complete and overtake Google to be the next-Google killer.

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?

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  

Clicks2Customers has joined forces with yet another high flying client - innovative local airline Kulula.com

Clicks2Customers has just signed Kulula.com as a client to increase search-engine traffic to its online travel website.

www.kulula.com offers low cost domestic airfares as well as package deals which include car hire and hotel bookings. Kulula is currently South Africa’s biggest online retailer, with over R1.3 billion in revenue generated via its Website annually.

Carl Scholtz, Kulula’s executive manager of IT, said: “Kulula turned to Clicks2Customers because of its reputation and expertise in online marketing and managing pay-per-click campaigns, especially in the travel and tourism sectors.”

Clicks2Customers has had an excellent success rate with travel websites and is keen to use this expertise to increase the awareness of Kulula’s products and services.

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.

As an SEM company with a global reach, we were very interested in getting some feedback from other people regarding their experiences.

The panel included online marketers from Japan, China, Singapore, Australia and Latin America.

Common to all these (and other) countries is that they are much more diverse than the US. Not only do many have multiple official languages but there are also cultural linguistic differences within languages. In asian countries one is also confronted by the problem of the character sets, and the search engine’s interpretation of ‘context’.

In China and Japan, there are multiple ways of expressing intent and different demographic groups use a different vocabulary.

Australia is the exception in that it is fairly homogeneous but Internet penetration is not as great as expected from a 1st world country, and relatively few users have broadband.

In Japan and Singapore on the other hand broadband is widespread and users are internet savvy. In Japan people can even scan bar-codes with their cellphones to compare prices online. Really cool stuff which shows the enormous potential of mobile search.

The Chinese market is massive, yet difficult to penetrate, even Google plays second fiddle to Baidu, the Chinese search engine giant. E-commerce is still fairly small in China and it seems to me the country is about a decade behind the US in terms of web usage (e.g. portals are the biggest sites in China)

Overall, the panelists confirmed what we experience in practice: every country is different and it is crucial to understand the local culture in order to set up a successful campaign. Don’t outsource your keywords and adcopy to a translation agency and expect that you’ll end up with a performing campaign. You need native speakers to understand the intricacies of foreign markets. And even then, not all foreign ventures are a guaranteed success…