Sydney Web Design

Yahoo today unveiled a trio of behaviorally targeted ad options for both search and display ads.

1. Search Retargeting for Display Ads — lets advertisers target display advertising based on a user’s search activity. So a user that searches on a term like “sandals” could be served a display ad for footwear elsewhere on Yahoo’s network.
2. Enhanced Retargeting for Display Ads — allows advertisers to deliver dynamically generated display ads across the Yahoo network based on user activity on an advertiser’s site. Going beyond standard site retargeting, the new technology would allow an advertiser to target users who visit an airline website to check offers for flights from SFO-JFK, and serve them a personalized offer for that specific flight when they visit a page within the Yahoo Network.
3. Enhanced Targeting for Search Ads — adds capabilities for Sponsored Search and Content Match ads, including ad scheduling and demographic targeting within search. New features are designed to extend the advertiser’s control over where and when an ad is shown at both the campaign and ad group level, including what time of day and day of the week an advertiser would like campaigns to run (ad scheduling), and what age and gender they’d like to reach (demographic). Advertisers will be able to vary their bids for different segments in order to increase their ability to reach the desired audience.

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Google AdWords has added four new videos to help you navigate their display ad builder. In addition to the previous two vids, the topics now cover:

• How to access the feature in AdWords
• How to search for the display ad templates that are right for you
• How to create an ad
• How to create an ad with no images required
• How to copy ads across ad groups
• Full product tutorial

You can check out the videos here.

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Bryan Eisenberg has published a comprehensive Google Analytics guide on his company’s blog. It consists of links to some of the best information about Google Analytics out there, from Google itself to various online marketing blogs.

The post also contains videos as well as links to, well, more videos. From initial setup and goal setting to internal search and campaign tracking, Eisenberg covers the bases.

Check out the Missing Google Analytics Manual here.

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Online news publishers will want to take note of eight tips that Google News is offering to help them better index your site. Here they are:

1. Keep the article body clean – keeping the content close to the title in the html and not breaking it up with a bunch of tags and other code will make it more likely that the correct content gets indexed
2. Make sure article URLs are permanent and unique
3. Take advantage of stock tickers in Sitemaps
4. Check your encoding – make sure it’s consistent and uniform
5. Make your article publication dates explicit
6. Keep original content separate from press releases
7. Format your images properly – use large images (JPEGs are crawled better) with “reasonable” aspect rations as well as descriptive captions.
8. Article Titles in Google News – be sure to have the title in both the title tag and as the headline of the page

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Facebook was coming up on Blogger to steal its top spot among social media sites when measured by total unique visitors worldwide.

Now, it appears as though Facebook has finally done it. Data from comScore, which unfortunately goes only through December 2008, shows how Facebook’s visitors (221 million) basically matched Blogger’s (225.5 million) by the end of the year. That’s a gap of just 4.5 million versus the gap of 21 million that existed in November. Assuming Facebook’s upward trend continued in January (and Blogger’s remained flat), the social network sits on top of the roost now.

Facebook stands out from the others not only because it’s the most popular; it’s also the only one showing consistently healthy growth. Chris DeWolf in a recent interview with Charlie Rose said how he doesn’t expect Facebook to pass MySpace by 2010 in terms of U.S. unique visitors (as we’ve predicted in the past). But that prospect is still inching towards reality, as shown by the graph below.

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Google experience 40% year-over-year growth in the number of searches in January 2009, according to Nielsen Online. Live Search experienced 18% year-over-year growth, but gained 2 percentage points over last month. Yahoo! grew a modest 8.7% year-over year, while the overall growth for all search engines was 27.5%.

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I’m not going to discuss the economic meltdown and its devastating effect on technology companies and Internet startups in this post, but rather something that crossed my mind earlier this morning: “Web 2.0? seems to become more and more a void (and an avoided) term. Of course, that’s not necessarily a bad thing, but it is definitely apparent.

So why do I say it’s fading? For one, because the number of startups that contact us and include the term Web 2.0 in the subject line or message is visibly dropping (and that’s a good thing), and I hardly ever see it mentioned anymore on other technology blogs and news sites either. That’s not really tangible, so I took a look at the number of mentions of the phrase across the web, and they seem to be decreasing significantly, reflecting my feeling on this.

Judging by Google Trends, which shows how often a particular search term is entered relative to the total search volume across various regions of the world (and in various languages), the term started being used at the end of 2004 when Tim O’Reilly organized the first edition of the Web 2.0 Conference. Search queries for the term started picking up in the middle of 2005, when TechCrunch was started – with the tagline “Tracking Web 2.0? by the way – and the number kept increasing until the end of 2007. After that, the trend is clearly downwards, falling back to the level it reached in early 2006 today. If the trend continues, there should only be a handful of people left who scour search engines for “Web 2.0? by 2011.

Also noteworthy: take a look at the geographic regions that have generated the highest volumes of worldwide search traffic for the term over the years – it’s Asia, with the top 5 regions being India, Singapore, Hong Kong, Taiwan and Malaysia (in that order). Furthermore, Google Trends pegs the number one language in which people search for stuff related to the topic of Web 2.0 to be Russian before English.

And just in case you’re curious: “Web 3.0? doesn’t seem to picking up much.
Let’s all rejoice.

Google’s “Insights for Search”, a beta service that analyzes a portion of worldwide Google web searches from all Google domains to compute how many searches have been done for the terms you’ve entered – relative to the total number of searches done on Google over time – gives an even better overview:

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Search Engine Roundtable and Webmaster World have started a discussion of Google’s testing of a SearchWiki for AdWords. The addition would give users the ability to push certain paid ads down similar to what they are offering for organic search results.

Following those two amusing comments the gates opened and all sorts of rumors and thoughts of gaming AdWords. If Google were to use any of this as feedback it is obvious gaming would run rampant and not the 1% one Sphinner suggests. AdWords is too big of a game and too important to major online advertisers for it to be open to such manipulation.

Interestingly Google has yet to enter into the fray.

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Google has launched a new blog that is dedicated to improving conversions. Dubbed the “Conversion Room,” the new blog is run by European Googlers. In addition to providing tips that are useful to a global audience, the Conversion Room will highlight events taking place in Europe.

So far, the blog offers tips on keywords and the most recent post talks about installing site search and tracking the results.

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Google has published a bit of an insider’s look on how the company conducts eye-tracking studies to evaluate the effectiveness of its search results.

In addition to holding interviews, field studies and live experiments to improve the usability of its products, Google has special hardware and software that tracks test participants’ eyeballs as they scan results for the perfect link.

The official blog post doesn’t detail any groundbreaking discoveries that have been produced by this testing technique. It sounds as though it has mostly helped Google confirm the obvious: that the first few results it returns are indeed usually the most relevant, and its so-called “universal search” effort (where it mixes rich media results like images and video thumbnails among the standard text results) doesn’t distract users too much but has actually proven rather useful.

Perhaps most intriguing is the following video provided by Google that shows how quickly users glance around result pages:

The bigger the dot, the longer the person sat looking at a particular part of the page.

This heatmap-like image, which is named the “golden triangle”, also suggests that people spend a lot more time evaluating the whole results at the top of the page than the ones further down.

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