DoubleClick for Publishers

Google has just announced its new ad serving technology which is geared for both large and small scale online publishers – DoubleClick for Publishers. This is actually a result of combining Google Ad Manager and DoubleClick Ad Exchange which Google purchase in 2008.

DoubleClick for Publishers, the main service will be available for large online publishers while DFP Small Business is geared for growing online publishers and is a simple, free version of the DFP. Existing DART for Publishers users will be automatically upgraded to DoubleClick for Publishers over the next year, while Google Ad Manager accounts will be moved to DFP for Small business in the coming weeks.

DoubleClick for Publishers will have the following features:

• A new interface that has been completely redesigned to save time and reduce errors.
• Far more detailed reporting and forecasting data to help publishers understand where their revenue is coming from and what ads are most valuable.
• Sophisticated algorithms that automatically improve ad performance and delivery.
• A new, open, public API which enables publishers to build and integrate their own apps with DFP, or integrate apps created for DFP by a growing third-party developer community (apps under development today include sales, order management and workflow tools).
• Integration with the new DoubleClick Ad Exchange’s “dynamic allocation” feature, which maximizes revenue by enabling publishers to open up their ad space to bids from multiple ad networks.

Source
DoubleClick for Publishers

 

Help Google For Transcriptions

Although spell checkers have been around for about 30 years, they still miss or incorrectly flag a whole lot of stuff (try “eye wonder weather this is write” and “monetize”).  Google wants its transcription software to become better more quickly, and so is asking for users for a hand.

On the Google Voice Blog, Vincent Paquet, a senior product manager, recently wrote, “Until now, the only feedback you could give was to let us know if the quality of the transcript was good enough to be useful or not, by checking the corresponding box next to the message.  You can now go one step further by letting us figure out why it was good or bad.  When you rate a transcript, you will be asked whether you would like to donate the message.”

Paquet then explained the meaning behind that phrase by continuing, “The messages you donate may be listened to, manually transcribed by us and/or used to gauge transcription improvements over time, but they will never be made public or used for any other purpose than improving the transcription quality.”

For every Margaret who’s tired of being called “maggot rot” and Taylor who doesn’t make clothes for a living, this is a nice option.  Even people who don’t opt to donate messages may appreciate it, since it reinforces the idea that Google doesn’t eavesdrop on conversations by default.

One other important note: this may represent a step towards launching Google Voice in the U.K. and Australia.

Source 

Help Google For Transcriptions

 

New Four Signals in Search Engine Search

Search engines constantly look for new signals they can use to improve the quality of the results they provide to users. Ultimately, user satisfaction is a critical component in retaining or increasing their market share, especially over the long term. Let’s explore some of these new potential signals and the way search engines evaluate and make decisions to use a new signal.

Back in the days of AltaVista, search engines were keyword-centric. These were the days when spammers loaded meta tags with large number of keywords, and also used invisible text to jack up the perceived relevance and value of a search page.

Google drove the next generation with its link-centric algorithm. However, this algorithm was also attacked and manipulated by spammers. As Google tuned its link-based algorithm, however, they were still able to keep the impact of spam much lower than it was in the keyword-centric days of search.

All the search engines rely heavily on links today, and these will remain critically important for the future. However, the complexity of the link algorithms in use today far exceeds that of the original PageRank paper by Larry Page and Sergey Brin.

However, spammers still have an impact on search results. The search engines want to continue to reduce that impact as much as possible. To aid in this, they continue to evaluate new potential signals that can improve search quality while making life harder for spammers. When good ideas are found, they are implemented.

Page Load Time

Google engineer Matt Cutts discussed this factor at Pubcon in November. Cutts indicated that there is a strong movement within Google to make page load time a ranking factor because pages that load quickly improve the user experience.

Because that is the case, why not make it a ranking factor? Cutts indicated that Google could start using this within the next year.

Clicks

In an interview with Josh Cohen of Google News, he indicated that click data is used as a ranking signal in Google News. In rough terms, the way that this would work is that Google knows what a normal distribution of clicks will be across the results.

Data leaked by AOL in 2006 suggested that the first result would get 42 percent of the clicks, the second would get 12 percent, the third would get 9 percent, the fourth result received 6 percent of the clicks, and so forth. But, if one particular result gets 10 percent in the fourth position instead of something closer to 6 percent, this could be a sign that the fourth result needs to move up in the SERP.

Cohen also indicated that Google News doesn’t use links as a ranking factor. But if click data works in the Google News environment, it isn’t a stretch to imagine that it would be helpful in Web search as well.

Web References

It’s well known that Google’s Local Search results factor in Web references as a ranking factor. A Web reference is a mention of a business that isn’t implemented as a link.

Web references count as votes in a manner similar to the way links are used. As with click data, it isn’t a stretch that these could start to have some weight in search results.

Closely related to this is the treatment of nofollowed links. Just because a link has the nofollow attribute doesn’t mean that it counts for absolutely nothing. Certainly, nofollow links in blog and forum comments will count for nothing. Nofollowed links that are implemented in something that looks like an ad will likewise pass no link juice.

However, other sites implement nofollow policies on all external links, such as many U.S. government sites. These sites are trying to identify resources that they consider valuable, even though they nofollow the links. The search engines could choose to associate some value with these links anyway. Remember, the goal is search quality.

Social Media

Facebook and Twitter are all the rage these days, and there are a lot of potential signals available from these sites. These can be treated as a type of Web reference by the search engines.

What makes them interesting is the “freshness” of the signal. A surge of discussion on Twitter about some world event could indicate that the topic of the discussion is a hot story. The real-time responsiveness of these sites can provide a strong signal.

Summary

How and when search engines will use these signals isn’t clear. Of course, the search engines will never spell it out for us.

An important goal for them is to reduce the impact of spam, and a lack of clarity about how they use the signals available to them helps their cause. Also, just because we can identify and talk about a potential signal doesn’t mean it will be useful.
Search engines have to look at and evaluate its impact on the results. Certain types of signals are “noisy,” meaning that they provide incomplete, inaccurate, or biased signals. For example, a Web site that is primarily used by one segment of the population (e.g., teenage girls) may have a lot of usage and present many signals that don’t work well for retired people.

One key thing to take away from all this is their focus on user satisfaction. If you create a Web site that is useful to users, it’s likely your site will emit many signals that tell the search engines that your site is a good result for users.

Source : New Four Signals in Search

 

Google Wave Invites Sending Started By Google

One of the most anticipated web apps of the year has just made its debut. Yes, that’s right: Google Wave has officially launched, as the flood of invites has begun. Be patient though: invites are not being sent out all at once.

While a select group of developers and media (including us) have had access to the unstable sandbox version of Google Wave, the real deal has been under wraps. In July, we learned that Google planned to invite 100,000 lucky early adopters to try out Wave at launch.

Now Google Wave Product Manager Stephanie Hannon confirms that invites are now being sent out.

Google’s been working non-stop to prep Wave for its debut. Now we’ll find out if Google Wave will change the web as we know it, or if it’s all hype.

Original Post At

GAME TIME : Google Starts Sending Google Wave Invites

 

ADWords Keyword Bidding Simplified With Google’s Bid Simulator Tool !!!!

PPC (pay-per-click) search advertisers often speculate about what would happen when they increase their CPC (cost per click) bids. How many more impressions, clicks and sales or leads would they get when they increase the keyword bid price? With the new Google Bid Simulator feature, advertisers will now be able to get a prediction of the number of times an ad would appear in the search results, the position the ad would have been shown in for a particular bid price and the number of clicks the ad would have received at that position.

Bid Simulator Benefits

The Google Bid Simulator tool is aimed to show “missed opportunity”, adds a level of transparency to the Google Adwords auction-based PPC system, provides advertisers with a better picture of the trade-off between cost and click-through volume, simplifies the bidding process by eliminated trail and error and gives advertisers insight so that they can make more informed bidding decisions.

How Bid Simulator Works

When Google Adwords advertisers access their Adwords account, they’ll see a blue Bid Simulator icon next to keywords’ Maximum CPC Bids label. Clicking on that icon will bring up the bid simulations for that particular keyword. The Bid Simulator uses data from the previous 7 days from a particular keyword and based on that information, it will show up a couple of different “simulations” for that keyword. For keywords that receive a low number of impressions the Bid Simulator shows an approximate number of impressions, estimates the number of clicks, the click cost and the average position for a bid that keyword may have generated based on a higher or lower maximum CPC (cost-per-click) bid. If a keyword receives a minimum number of impressions below a certain threshold the Bid Simulator icon may not appear.

Within the Bid Simulator advertisers can select any of the bid prices that are presented and change the bid within the tool. While this may be increasing the transparency of a “black box” auction-based bidding system, this is hardly going back to the days of knowing what you had to bid to get a certain position. Google stresses though that this is just a projection; and that advertisers won’t necessarily get exactly those results. The Google Adwords blog cautions that “past performance does not guarantee future results.” There are so many factors that go into keyword bidding that there’s no way to predict future campaign performance.

While the Bid Simulator isn’t an exact blueprint for a bidding strategy, but what it can do is make projections so that advertisers don’t not have to. Advertisers could look back at their past results and use them to predict what effect bid changes will have on the keywords in their campaigns. However, for the keywords that get sufficient traffic, Google is doing that already with the Bid Simulator. And, because Google has access to information about the campaign quality score advertisers can be sure that their projections are going to be a lot more accurate than any they could have come up with on their own. Advertisers can use this information to their advantage when plotting out future budgets for their campaigns.

However, for the keywords that get sufficient traffic, Google is doing that for them with the Bid Simulator. Since Google has access to quality score information of all advertising accounts advertisers can be sure that their projections are going to be a lot more accurate than any they could come up with on their own. Advertisers can use this information to their advantage when plotting out budgets for their future advertising campaigns.

It’s interesting to note that Yahoo has a similar tool, which has been active ever since they launched the new Panama system three years ago. Yahoo refers to it as “bid forecasting” and it’s available by clicking on any keyword in a Yahoo Sponsored Search campaign. Once again, the projections are based on previous data, so the more traffic a keyword gets, the more information the program can use for the forecast. Yahoo offers up a few more metrics in their projections (average position, CTR) but the projections are thought to be less accurate. Again, the best way to use this tool is to make future projections, not necessarily take it at face value as a keyword bid recommendation.

The Bid Simulator is being touted as a great addition to the tools Google Adwords already has at its disposal. Once again they are overshadowing Yahoo, despite the fact that Yahoo already has it’s own version of the tool. The Bid Simulator tool is coming across as making the auction in Google Adwords more transparent, but advertisers should be cautious. Remember that there are other factors like ROI that dictate how advertisers should direct their bidding strategy. When used as a projection tool and as a measurement of missed opportunities, the Google Adwords Bid Simulator can be a powerful tool in the hand of a skilled Google Adwords advertiser.

Original Source At

Google’s Bid Simulator Tool Adds More Transparency to Adwords Keyword Bidding

 

Google Might Be On Yahoo’s Home Page

Senior director’s comments elicit big “huh?”

The Yahoo search experience might at some point change in a very surprising way.  That Bing may take over, we’ve come to accept.  But at least one high-ranking Yahoo employee thinks Google could get a shot, too.

Let’s talk about said employee for a moment.  Burke Culligan is the senior director of product planning and strategy over Yahoo’s front page and My Yahoo, so he’s in a good position to discuss significant adjustments.  Also, Culligan’s worked for Yahoo since October of 2005, so it’s not like he’s some newbie who doesn’t know the score.

Judge the next bit for yourself, then.

Joseph Tartakoff reported, “During an update on the status of the home page, Yahoo senior director Burke Culligan told analysts that the company was not opposed to letting users replace Yahoo search with Microsoft’s Bing or even Google.”

Culligan apparently explained, “Right now, we’re not doing that but long-term that may not be out of the question.  We want to provide the best experience for the user and, in some way, if that was the best experience for the user we might be open to that.”


This led Kit Eaton to speculate that the proposed Microsoft-Yahoo deal is falling apart.  Or perhaps Culligan was talking about what will happen after it expires in ten years.  Regardless, his comments were rather striking, and we’ll keep an ear out for any denials or clarifications that follow.

Google Might Be On Yahoo’s Home Page

 

“Google Internet Stats” By Google

It appears Google has pulled together a bunch of statistics throughout the web and created a small landing page named Google Internet Stats on the Google UK front. The page explains that this service “brings together the latest industry facts and insights together in one place.” Google collected this data from many third party vendors, on a wide range of topics. In fact, you can submit your data using this form.

Here is a picture of the mobile technology internet stats from this tool:

The categories of statistics include: –

Consumer Trends – Community – Entertainment – Information – eCommerce – Macro Economic Trends – Rest of the World – UK – Media Consumption – Changes in Media Usage – Demographic Usage – Media Consumption Stats – Media Multi-tasking – Personalised Media Experiences – Media Landscape – All Media – Online – Technology – Broadband – Devices – Mobile – Speed

The current data providers include B2Bonline.com, BARB, BusinessWeek, Coke, Commission of the European Communities, Comscore, Core Metrics, Datamonitor, Deloitte, The Economist, eMarketer, Enders Analysis, Eurostat, Film Distributors Association, Financial Times, Forrester, GFK, Google Insights for Search, Greenbee.com, Guardian, HarvardBusiness.org, Hitwise, IAB, IFPI, IMF, Internet Retailing, Internetworldstats.com, JP Morgan, KMPG, Media & Marketing, Mediascope Europe, Mindshare, Motorola, Net Imperative, New York Magazine, Nielsen, NMA, Ofcom, Opsos MediaCT, PriceWaterhouseCoopers, QuickPlay Media Inc., Retail Week, Reuters, TGI Net, Times Online, TNS, Verdict Research, Wall Street Journal, WARC, YouTube, ZenithOptimedia, and GM.

Postscript: A Google UK representative answered some of my questions, clarifying the following:

• There are no plans to launch this tool elsewhere at the moment. This is a UK-only initiative.
• Any stats submitted by users will be verified by Google’s market research teams
• Google license data from a number of sources, as well as bring together publicly reported facts and stats from the web (sources shown on the site)

Google has an official blog post on this new initiative at their Google Barometer blog.

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Google Launches “Google Internet Stats”

 

Searching on YouTube With New Ways

YouTube Adds Wonder Wheel and Improves Advanced Search

Youtube is supposedly the second largest search engine. It only makes sense that the video site’s search capabilities should be expanded. that is just what YouTube has been working on. This week, they have added some new ways to customize your search experience, and hopefully better find the videos you are looking for.

The Wonder Wheel

You may recall that Google introduced its new search options a while back, which gives users of the search engine a lot more control over the results they see for any given search. One of the features in this release was the “wonder wheel,” which is basically a visual representation of related searches that you can use to navigate through your search experience.

YouTube has now incorporated this into its results as well. When you perform a search on YouTube, you may see a link on the right side above the results that says “wonder wheel”. Clicking it will bring up something that looks like this:

Wonder wheel doesn’t appear to be an option for all searches. When I search for “social media” I am not presented with the option, but when I search for “Facebook” as in the above image, I am.

Improved Advanced Search

When you go to search something on YouTube, and you click the “advanced options” link, you will now be presented with more options.

“Let’s say you want to narrow down your search for a video and be more precise about what you’re looking for,” explains the YouTube Team. “Advanced Search allows you to specify many more details than our normal search, including when a video was uploaded, the location it came from, and its length. We’ve reworked Advanced Search to be easier to use and to better reflect the range of content on YouTube (lots of new stuff!).”

To be honest, I’m not really sure what all features were available here in the past, but now you can find results using queries and specifying to use all words, an exact phrase, one or more words, or none of the words. You can request results based on videos, channels, playlists, shows, movies, or all. You can request results to show only HD, annotations, closed captions, or partner videos.

You can also refine your search by duration, language, upload time (general – anytime, this month, this week, or today), location, and category.

Other recent features added to YouTube include a remaining time display on the upload progress bar, the ability to download MP4 files of your own videos, and YouTube XL, which is designed to give users a more television-like experience. YouTub’e mobile app is also now available in French, UK English, Italian, Spanish, German, and Dutch.

Source : webpronews.com