MyADLETS, The Viral Frontier.: February 2009

Saturday, February 28, 2009

Webinar, How To Effectively Use Efficient TV Advertising To Boost Your Business

Join a webinar presented by Google, hosted by John McAteer, the Director of Google’s Retail Team, and Dan Gertsacov from Google’s TV Ads Team.
The duo will be presenting and lead a discussion on how to use Google TV Ads to help boost your business. Learn how to reach new customers efficiently and generate greater returns on your marketing investments.
Webinar Information;
Register Here.

Date and time:	Wednesday, March 4, 2009 10:00 am Pacific Standard Time (GMT -08:00, San Francisco)
Duration:	1 hour
Description:	The retail industry is facing new challenges with declines in consumer spending. These changes require a renewed focus on managing your marketing resources effectively – in particular, your media dollars – in order to maximize ROI. John Mcateer and Dan Gertsacov will lead a discussion on how to use Google TV Ads to help boost your business. Learn how to reach new customers efficiently and generate greater returns on your marketing investments.

Friday, February 27, 2009

Why People Read "Inside AdWords" blog

According to a recent survey among users, ( Which is still open for your input) many of us visit the inside adwors blog for;

67% of you read the blog at least once a week, so thanks for the loyal readership!
The top reason for reading the blog is to learn about new features and releases (voted for by 89% of readers), followed by keeping track of online advertising trends (voted for by 53% of readers).
The top product, outside of AdWords, that you want to read more about is Google Analytics (voted for by 74% of readers).

Inside AdWords: Your feedback on the blog

iPhones, iPod, Android And Other Mobile Visitors, Thanks To Google Analytics

With Apple predicting to sell multi million iPhones and having web access where ever there is a cellular connection, there will be millions of people, a quite a large segment coming to visit you from iPhones. There are many people who are using iPod, Android, SymbianOS to browse the web as well. You can see from above picture, data from another blog of ours.
Do you know how many of your traffic are mobile users and if they are significant, are you serving them right? like providing a mobile version of your site so they users do not find your site over flowing and difficult to navigate.
Finding the answer has been made easier by Google Analytics. We have been fans of Google Analytics for a long time and were very happy to find this advanced segmentation feature. The blog tells you how to add different segmentation features to dashboard. By following the instructions I was able to add not only iPhone users but iPod, Android, SymbianOS and of course total of all as mobile users.
I was surprised with the results. Time for mobile section of the web site, 568 mobile users are not to be ignored. This is from a tiny site, so big boys, check your visitors because you may want to look into Mobile Advertising too. Also remember those people may have money to spend, at least they are paying big bucks for iPhone device and accounts.
Thank you Google Analytics!
Google Analytics Blog: Web Analytics Tips & Tricks: How Many of Your Visits are from iPhones?

Where Does Your Traffic Come From?

According to Google Analytics, that I use extensively to measure my website performances, it is very important to know where your traffic comes from and arrange your contents and ads accordingly.
So do you know? Is it direct traffic, referral or search engine traffic

FeedBurner Accounts to Google Accounts, Convert Soon

If you are using Google Adsense for Feeds and Feedburner as your Feed Burner, you need make sure that you take a few steps to convert your feedburner account to a Google account. Even if you think you have done it, visit your feedburner account and please verify the fact.
Follow the link for more information.
FEEDoTopia: Transfer FeedBurner Accounts to Google Accounts, More Info
Tags: Google Adsense for Feeds, FeedBurner, FeedBurner Accounts

Thursday, February 26, 2009

Ads With Your Google News

Ads with your Google news seems to be the newest addition to the Google Advertising. The ads will appear when you search on Google News provided you are from USA. The Google Ads are similar to what you get with Google Search or with Google Book Search.
The ads themselves are experiments based on different formats like overlay ads, embedded videos from partners. Publishers and advertisers will benefit from these experiments as usual.
I have a screen cap searching for Google Phone related news, for those people who are out side of USA and do not know how to uses a proxy! :)
Google News Blog: Ads in Google News search results

Monday, February 23, 2009

Google A Advertising Monopoly?

Bam, with all the good news floating around these days, I was not much too happy to read the article on Bloomberg about President Obama's nominated Antitrust chief, Christine A. Varney, might be gunning for Google.
“For me, Microsoft is so last century. They are not the problem,” Varney said at a June 19 panel discussion sponsored by the American Antitrust Institute. The U.S. economy will “continually see a problem -- potentially with Google” because it already “has acquired a monopoly in Internet online advertising,” she said.
But Barney has also praised Google previously;
"The Mountain View, California- based company, owner of the world’s most popular search engine, is a “spectacular” innovator that became the dominant online advertiser through “terrific work,” Varney said. She also said Google had “lawfully” obtained its monopoly."
I for one will be watching this!
Bloomberg article takes you through her role in previous governments and anti trust case against Microsoft.

Thursday, February 19, 2009

Is Your SSL Web Transactions Secure? BlackHat Conference Says NO!

You may have seen the padlock mark on your browsers status bar when you visit a secure site that begins with HTTPS://. You know it is secure, you conduct you banking or ecommerce transaction because certificate provider like Verisign says that the session is secure. An independent hacker at Blackhat conference has shown otherwise.
Independent hacker Moxie Marlinspike demonstrated a number of ways the “chain of trust” intercepted during a SSL encrypted transaction at the Black Hat security conference in Washington DC.
Marlinspike claimed that by deploying attack using free software tool called “SSL Strip” on several secure websites such as PayPal, Gmail, Ticketmaster and Facebook, he garnered 117 email accounts, 16 credit card numbers, seven PayPal logins among many other secure logins.

Google Maps Search Tweak Shows More Results Like "CoffeeShops In Berkeley"

Google Maps went through a small tweak recently to give you more results on a search conducted on a map. Previously Google Maps showed the top 10 results of a local search conducted. Now you see more results and to make the top ten distinct, Google places map makers on them, Others are shown as dots and may be closer to you or to a place you might be visiting later.
To test the feature, I searched for Coffee in Berkeley to see coffeeshops around UC Berkeley campus. Even though I know most of these coffeeshops, yet I found a new one on my walk / bike ride to the campus. But that might not stop me from going to Peet's Coffee.
I think this will attract more business a chance to be prommianant. Advertising on maps!

Google LatLong: 1000 is the new 10

http://snapvoip.blogspot.com/

Saturday, February 14, 2009

Google Drops Radio Ads Too.

We noticed and reported that Google was getting out of print Ad business. I think it was a wise move and when there is no return from what you do, you move away to another place or drop the under performing enterprise.
So Google is dropping one other advertising ventures. Radio advertising. Google started Audio Ads and Google Radio Automation in 2006 to bring in revenue from / for broadcast radio, produce more relevant advertising for listeners and to streamline the process of buying and selling of radio ads.
But according to the post below, all is not lost as Google is selling off Radio Automation Business and plan to use the lessons learned will focused on online streaming audio. I for one looking forward to see what it will be.
Traditional Media: Let's Take it Offline: Google Exits Radio but Will Explore Online Streaming Audio

Thursday, February 12, 2009

Yahoo Search Pad, For Research Online

Yahoo launched their search pad which let you conduct research by taking notes while surfing the web. Search Pad allows you to cut and paste from various websites and once the note taking mode is enabled, most of these tasks are done automatically for you in the back ground. I think it will be a boom to people who write articles or engaged in making money via weblogs to gather the information to from all over the web to formulate a proper article.

(Search Pad is) a new feature we’re testing on Yahoo! Search that helps you keep track of websites and take notes whenever you do research online. It intelligently understands when you’re in research mode and, if you choose, collects information about the sites you visit. You can create research documents with saved websites, edit and reorder your personal notes, and share them with friends. No more handwritten scrawls, Post-Its or scattered documents. And you can access them from wherever you are.

Yahoo Search Pad is currently only in testing and is not visible to all users. Mean while you can get some information on the project from Yahoo blog.

Google Punishes Google.JP And Drops PageRank!

I noticed this on Matt Cutts twitter, "Google.co.jp PageRank is now ~5 instead of ~9. I expect that to remain for a while." and after further investigation I found a post by Google Blogscoped, it is Google Punishing itself for link spam vis paid posts. Google.jp has recently gone hunting and buying blog posts in a promotion campaign. So when google says it is serious about paid posts on blogs, I guess, it is serious. (more info)

Monday, February 9, 2009

Display Relevant Google News On Your Website

I usually start my web day with reading Google News among other news portals. But I am sure many of you start your day with your own website. In that case, Google has offered means for you to run Google news sidebar or a Google news widget on your site, saving you you few clicks. (In my case click home icon and then click news as my starter page is Google.)
You will also be able to focus on the segment of the news you want to read or know. Perhaps what your readers might be interested in like Sports, Business or entertainment. If you prefer, you can also select keywords releated to your website, like Advertising or The viral frontier, as I would chose.
All these are thanks to Google Ajax Search API and you can read their post or just run the wizard offered by the team. I learnt about it at the following link;
Official Google Blog: Add Google News to your website