In this case, the difference in user interaction is so clear and marked we could tell extremely quickly which one worked better: the difference is in the thickness of the plus box next to the stock quote. Now, coming to the conclusion that one is "better" is tricky, and there's many a possible slip on the way there. Does more interaction with the plus box mean that it is better? How about if users then miss good results because they are distracted by the more prominent plus box? If we've done our job right, almost without your noticing, things will work just that little bit better for you.

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• Experiment Pruning: This new feature allows you to disable one or more combinations from taking part in your Website Optimizer experiments. Pruning can help you achieve faster, more meaningful results by allowing you to remove poorly performing or illogical combinations. This is especially helpful in cases where your experiment may have too many combinations relative to the amount of traffic it receives.

In the past, there wasn't an easy way for you to disable low performing or
illogical combinations. You'd have to stop a test, make a copy, lose all your test data, and then launch a new test. That's all changing starting today. Now, you can simply select any number of page variations from your experiment report, click our new "Disable" button, and you're done. Easy as that. All your future traffic will be sent to your remaining page variations, and you'll be on the path to quicker, more actionable test results

• A/B Offline Validation: If your test or goal pages aren't accessible to Website Optimizer then no worries. You'll now be able to just upload a copy of your tagged page and Website Optimizer will make sure that everything is tagged properly.
• More Intuitive Reporting: We've enhanced our reports to more clearly show how your combinations are performing, and to better indicate when we've found one or more high-confidence winning combinations. This will help prevent you from drawing false conclusions from results or from ending experiments prematurely.
  

Labels: Google, Web Analytics

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Labels: Google, MSN, Yahoo

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Google Translate for iPhone is optimized for speed, supports all of the existing Google Translate language pairs, and uses a client-side data-store on your iPhone to hang on to your past translations so you always have them at hand, even if you can't use the local data network. We wrote this using the AJAX Language API, so every time the Google Translate team updates the languages they support, the languages will automatically be added here.

Labels: Google, Mobile Marketing

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Today, we're launching Google Insights for Search, a new product designed with the advertiser in mind. It provides more flexibility and functionality for advertisers and marketers to understand search behavior, and adds some cool new features like a world heat map to graphically display search volume and regional interest.

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Last week, Kent Sugarman of the Google Adsense team helped users understand how to get higher quality and more relevant Google Adsense ads to display within your content:

1. Use text in addition to images when possible. Please note that the crawler can't read text contained within images.
2. If you use images, be sure to title them appropriately and provide descriptive ALT tags.
3. Try imagining your site without pictures or dynamic content. This will give you a good idea of what our crawler reads. If you lack imagination, you can try turning the images off in your web browser.

If your site uses a lot of these features, make sure you provide enough text-based content in one of our supported languages to effectively convey the topic of your site. If our crawler doesn’t find enough text, you may get poorly targeted ads

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1. Stay in touch
   Want to know about the newest releases, options, and features in the AdWords API? Check out the following resources, where you can hear from us and interact with other developers:
   Website, Blog. Mailing List, Forum
2. Keep current with versioning
   
   Through our versioning, we're continually offering added functionality to the AdWords API, as well as making changes to its existing functionality. Migrate your code to newer versions, and you can take advantage of the latest features.
3. Manage your API Units
   The AdWords API uses an API Units System to distribute our resources fairly among our many users and ensure reliability for all. Understanding your AdWords API Units usage over time via the following resources will allow you to budget according to your needs:
   AdWords API Center: Sign in to your AdWords MCC account and visit the AdWords API Center to view your current usage and, if available, allocations.
4. Test in the sandbox
   Want a place to test without consuming API units? Use the AdWords API Sandbox environment to test out your applications without consuming API Units.
5. Use reports
   How do you gauge how your campaigns are doing? Reporting can give you all of the essential statistics you need, with minimal API Unit costs. Reporting can help you conveniently analyze many aspects of your campaigns, from structure to performance.
6. Insert ads before keywords
   Optimize your campaigns by always inserting ads into an ad group before placing keywords in it.
7. Create a local store of AdWords data
   Enjoy the power of having AdWords data on a server in your office. Many users boost the efficiency of their AdWords API response times by mirroring important parts of their campaigns in a local database.
8. Use the AdWords API libraries
   Why reinvent the AdWords API wheel? We’ve created two resources to help jump-start your development.
   AdWords API Client Libraries, AdWords API Starter Kit
9. Optimize your account
   Use the AdWords API to streamline the performance of your campaigns and eliminate waste.
   Use zero-impression , Use the Keyword Estimator. Add negative keywords, Use the Report Service to find search queries that resulted in unwanted clicks on your ads.
10. Handle disapproved ads
    Sometimes ads submitted to AdWords don't comply with our editorial or content guidelines, which are designed to create as user-friendly experience as possible. To handle any disapprovals smoothly and reduce overall ad downtime, design a process for handling disapproved ads.

Labels: Google

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1. Webmaster tools help you configure your website so that you can acquire visitors
2. Analytics gives you insight on what your visitors are doing on your website and where they are coming from.
3. Website Optimizer helps businesses perfects the lead acquisition process and promotes a better user experience. Website optimizer has to be used in parallel with analytics so that you can really measure the success of your landing page tests.

Register to attend here.

If you can't make that date, you'll be able to access an archived version of the presentation via the same registration URL. And lest you forget, you can always visit Google Webmaster Central to see everything Google offers to help you build and maintain your best site.

Labels: Google, Web Analytics

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G5 Search Marketing Inc., announced this week that they have formed a strategic alliance with Google to become an authorized reseller of Google's AdWords™ advertising program. By delivering relevant ads when users search online for specific products and services, AdWords enables businesses to use the web to find new customers. Integrating AdWords into the G5 Local Advertising Platform empowers G5 to help local businesses efficiently tap into the power and reach of the Google AdWords online advertising platform.

G5 gives business owners visibility into the precise local advertising efforts that attract the most profitable customers. As the $100 billion local advertising industry shifts online, it is increasingly important to make targeted advertising decisions. G5 gives local businesses a range of options by offering full-service AdWords account management – from account setup and activation to maintenance, optimization and, most importantly, measurement.

AdWords is a cost effective, efficient way for businesses of all sizes to advertise their products and services at exactly the time their customers are looking for them. Using the cost-per-click (CPC) model, businesses can select and bid on keywords related to what they are selling, and pay only when an interested user clicks on their ad. Advanced targeting options, customizable ads and detailed reporting enable advertisers to evaluate the benefits and performance of their cost-per-click advertising efforts. More information is available at www.adwords.google.com.

G5 offers local businesses solutions for their advertising efforts through a robust platform that includes a full online suite of solutions. Included in this platform is a measurement tool that can effectively measure the best return on ad spend across any and all media types.

"This relationship provides for an exceptionally important addition to our unique platform," Said Hobin. "We can now offer local and regional businesses an all-in-one platform that includes not only AdWords pay-per-click advertising, but also Local Maps Optimization, Organic Search and, most importantly, measurement for their advertising across all media."

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We see this program as a win for CMS providers and website-owners alike. CMS platforms of any size can offer their customers a powerful A/B and multivariate testing solution, which might have cost them millions of dollars to develop internally. Site-owners who build and manage their websites through these platforms can in turn launch Website Optimizer experiments more easily to help improve their conversion rates. And perhaps most importantly, the web becomes a more useful place for users since more web pages will be improved through customer input.

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Google Trends is not only a fun tool; it also offers some practical uses as well. Suppose you own an ice cream shop and don't know which flavors to serve, or suppose you're responsible for stocking supermarkets across the country; Trends can help you explore the popularity and seasonality of your products. To conduct your own, more detailed analyses, you can now easily export Trends data to a .csv file (a common format to import/export data), which can be opened in most spreadsheet applications. When you use the export function, you'll also have the choice of using either relative scaling (what we've shown here) or fixed scaling (scaled to a specific time range).

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Google accounted for 68.29 percent of all U.S. searches in the four weeks ending May 31, 2008, Hitwise announced yesterday. Yahoo! Search, MSN Search and Ask.com each received 19.95, 5.89 and 4.23 percent respectively. The remaining 41 search engines in the Hitwise Search Engine Analysis Tool accounted for 1.63 percent of U.S. searches.



In the U.K. market, Google search properties (Google.co.uk and Google.com) accounted for 87 percent of all UK searches in May 2008 representing a 12 percent increase compared to May 2007. Yahoo! search properties accounted for 4.09 percent of UK searches in May 2008, a 2 percent increase compared to April 2008. MSN search properties accounted for 3.72 percent and Ask search properties accounted for 3.07 percent of searches. MSN increased two percent compared to April 2008 and Ask increased 6 percent.

Labels: Google, MSN, Yahoo

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Below are some of the latest blog posts across some Google's most popular blogs:

Contacts API with the iPhone
Posted by Jeff Scudder, Google Data APIs Team In case you hadn't seen this on the Google Mac Blog , a recent post highlighted the use of the Google Contacts Data API . The Address Book application in Mac OS X 10.5.3 now lets iPhone users sync their Address Book with their Google contacts. To try it, go to the Address Book menu, choose Preferences, and then check Synchronize with Google. It'll ask for your Google account and password, then automatically update your contacts every time you sync your…

One Fish, Two Fish, Red Fish, Blue Fish
Posted by Marissa Mayer, VP Search Products & User Experience, and Micheal Lopez, Web Designer You may have noticed that Google has a new favicon, the small icon you see in your browser next to the URL or in your bookmarks list. Some people have wondered why we changed our favicon -- after all, we hadn't in 8.5 years(!). The reason is that we wanted to develop a set of icons that would scale better to some new platforms like the iPhone and other mobile devices. So the new favicon is one of those,…

Appcelerator gives you Gears functionality out of the box
Posted by Dion Almaer, Gears Team Jeff Haynie announced that the latest Appcelerator SDK supports Gears . First, for those that haven't heard of Appcelerator , it is an open source "RIA" development toolkit that focuses on rich clients talking to services on the backend. You can think of it somewhat as a Flex-like framework built with Open Web technology. We are seeing an interesting trend. At first, frameworks would wrap Gears semantics in something that makes sense for their audience of…

Site maintenance on June 7 at 10am PDT
By now, our longtime publishers are likely well-versed in our regular maintenance -- so sing along if you know the words: Our engineers will be performing routine site maintenance tomorrow, June 7th, from 10am to 2pm PDT. During these four hours, you won't be able to log in to your account. However, ad serving will not be affected, and your reports will continue to track your earnings as usual. We've noticed from past comments that many of you are concerned about public service ads (PSAs) or no ads…

Opening our doors in Lenoir
Posted by Kendra Intihar, Administrative Assistant, Google Lenoir Whether you're shopping for shoes, planning a trip or watching a funny video, you probably don't think much about where that website you're on actually "lives." Though they seem just to exist in some "cloud" out there in "cyberspace," all websites are actually hosted on computers, similar to the one you have at home or work. But millions of websites processing terabytes of data every day -- all of…

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Labels: comScore, Google

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The Radish is a portable solar-powered calendar device that was recently introduced at the Google I/O conference. It is designed to reduce paper consumption and automate calendar display outside Google conference rooms.

The goal of Radish is to replace this manual process with a portable device that can wirelessly retrieve and display scheduled events for conference rooms. For Google, this would translate to a savings of about six reams of paper a day, not to mention the printer resources and manual labor required to deliver the paper schedules to the conference room doors. Aaron has also determined that about 20-30% of all reservations are changed during the day, hence the Radish also overcomes the static nature of a paper display with real-time data.

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More and more each day you probably see Google's custom search engine functionality appear on site's across the Internet. In fact, I have implemented the Google custom search engine on two of my own sites. If you are looking for a simple way to enhance your users' engagement level on your site then I recommend you take a closer look at Google custom search engine. Below are few of the top reasons I like it so much:

• Giving users what they are used to: More than half the world prefers Google's search results and are comfortable interacting with the search box as well as the search results. Google Custom search engine provides the exact same search experience as Google.com but on YOUR site.
• Building your own search engine is difficult: Have you ever tried designing your own site search functionality, it's definitely not simple. It's difficult to apply the same type of algorithms Google does so that you can sort your results smarter than just alphabetically. With the custom search engine the algorithms are applied for you and you gain all the benefits of the awesome performance.
• Access to deeper content: Many sites on the Internet have some of their best content buried deep within their folder structure, the custom search engine allows your users to find that deep content within 1 click without getting frustrated and abandoning your site.
• Access to new content, not a huge issue anymore: One previous draw back of Google Custom Search vs. a proprietary search was that Google took a little while longer to index newer content which made a given site's internal search results not as fresh. However, with the recent changes, your new content can be made available quicker by leveraging Google's XML sitemaps.
• Customization: Google Custom Search Engine allows you to customize your configuration in many different ways including: look and feel of results, style of search box, placement of ads, sites to search within, ability to introduce AdSense, method of displaying results and refinement labels for popular website topics.

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Android Scan was developed by Jeffrey Sharkey and is one of the 50 winners of Google's Android Developer Challenge. It is also is one of the coolest and most useful mobile applications I have ever seen. Read the description below and watch the video to get a better understanding of Android Scan.

Scan is an Android application that finds pricing and metadata for anything with a barcode. Here are some key features that make Scan stand out:

• Automatic barcode recognition using onboard phone camera using ZXing * Shows CD, DVD, or book cover along with detailed reviews from Amazon.com
• Searches over a dozen stores, both online and brick+mortar o Highlights brick+mortar stores that are nearby, with option to call the store or get directions o Links to online storefronts to buy online from the phone
• Tracklisting for CDs, along with option to play sample tracks right on phone
• For books, searches local libraries to see if they have a copy

Labels: Android, Google

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Labels: comScore, Google

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