Search Engine Monthly: December 2009 Issue

In this Issue:

GOOGLE

Introducing Google Comparison Ads (Paid Search)

Google officially announced a new feature in Adwords called, “Comparison Ads”, being test marketed in the Mortgage and Refinancing sectors. Advertisers now have a new way to have their products and services compared side-by-side against the competition. According to Google, “Comparison Ads improves the advertising experience on the search engine by letting users specify exactly what they are looking for and helping them quickly compare relevant offers side by side.”

We suggest the following articles for additional information:

Google Adwords Announces New Product Listing Ads (Paid Search)

Google Adwords announced this month that they will be testing new product Listing Ads with a small number of retailers. Although still in the beta stage, these new visually appealing ads could become a larger part of paid search results, if they perform well with consumers. These highly targeted ads will be available through an advertiser’s Google Merchant Center account and include an image of the product, product name, the name of the merchant and of course the price. A few sample ads from the official Adwords blog are shown below:

Features include:

Pay on Cost-Per-Action basis: Product Listing Ads will work on a cost-per-action (CPA) basis, which means that the merchant will only pay Google if a consumer clicks on the ad and buys the listed product. This offers an advantage over traditional cost-per-click (CPC) and cost-per-thousand impression (CPM) methods because merchants only pay for the ad if a sale is completed.

Low Maintenance: Unlike text ads, Product Listing Ads require no additional keywords or descriptive text. This enables merchants with large product inventories to more efficiently setup their campaigns as a lot of the legwork is now not necessary.

It will be interesting to see how the product listing ads perform this holiday shopping season. Don’t be surprised if you see one of these new ads the next time you search for a specific product in Google!

We suggest the following articles for additional information:

Expect Caffeine After The Holidays (Search)

Early this fall, Google mentioned the release of the developer’s preview of the new Google update, Google Caffeine. This update is said to improve the quality of search results by enhancing the Google indexing infrastructure. To date, because of the positive feedback, Google has decided to move to the next stage and release Caffeine at one data center. According to Matt Cutts, slowly releasing the new update will allow for more feedback and improvements, as well as taking the pressure off of webmasters during the holiday season.

We suggest the following articles for additional information:

Excuse me, But Where did Google's Organic Search Results Go? (SEO)

In the earlier days of Google, search results were defined in two different sections organic on the left and paid ad results on the right. These two sections were separated showing where the dividing line is, however, in recent year that line has been crossed by the introduction of local business results with a map that pushes the organic results further down the page. Now the Google search results page looks like this:

This trend will continue as Google unveils new products, and as a result, some believe that the future of search marketing will be a battle for the highest bid and not one for relevancy.

We suggest the following articles for additional information:

Google Acquires Admob for $750 Million

Google recently announced that it is acquiring AdMob for $750 million, which is a huge benefit for the Google investors. This will allow Google to increase its ad scope in to the mobile market as well as create a new channel for Google to promote to advertisers. AdMobs is a mobile advertising company started in 2006 by Omar Hamoui. According to Omar, “We believe this deal will benefit our advertisers, developers and publishers by:

  • Increasing our investment in building innovative and engaging ad units across platforms and to further improve targeting and tracking.
  • Building even more powerful relevance and optimization capabilities, and more powerful technology and tools to monetize mobile traffic.
  • Increasing the effectiveness of display advertising on mobile devices by leveraging Google sales team, infrastructure and relationships.
  • Improving the already high level of service and support we deliver to our advertisers, developers and publishers.”

Google has created a blog to communicate the acquisition and what it means for future advertisers.

We suggest the following articles for additional information: