Google

You probably weren’t using Google in 1999. You might not even have heard of it. But in the past ten years it has won us over in many more aspects of our online lives than just search:

• Google Analytics (2005). Making what were previously enterprise-level website statistics available to all – for free, of course
• Google Maps (2005). Remember how clunky online maps were before?
• Google Docs (2006). Taking the idea of cloud-based applications mainstream (although most people still cling to the security blanket of Microsoft Office.
• YouTube (acquired 2006). The Queen launched the official Royal Channel in 2007.
• Picasa (2006). Not as popular as Flickr, but free-er.
• Gmail (2007 opens for all). Invites were like gold-dust until 2007 and the service only came out of beta in 2008.
• Android (2007). An open source operating system for mobile phones.
• Streetview (US launch 2007; UK 2008). Despite complaints from some about privacy, Google continues to photograph the whole world. They recently added Pompei
• Chrome (2008 for PC, 2009 for Mac). Claims to be the fastest, most stable web browser around. Certainly beats Internet Explorer (but what doesn’t).
• Google Navigation (launched in selected US cities 2009; roll-out 2010). Garmin and TomTom’s share price tumbled when Google announced release of their free turn-by-turn navigation application and they’ve been slashing prices ever since.

They’re doing quite well financially, too. In the last full financial year (to 31 December 2008) they made over $4.2 billion profit. Not bad for a company that hadn’t worked out a monetization model until 2001, when they launched AdWords. Although they didn’t invent the ‘pay-per-click’ platform and they weren’t the first to place adverts on search engine results pages, they were the first to figure out how to really make it pay – for themselves, but also for advertisers and users.

Connecting to the Internet

Almost all of us were still on dial-up connections to the Internet in 1999. Ten years later we’re almost all on broadband. Here’s a rather dull chart from the Office for National Statistics that shows the rate of changeover.

Changing gadgets

In 1999 most of us used:

• film cameras (and photo albums)
• floppy disks
• road atlases
• basic mobile phones
• VCRs
• CDs

Over the decade these have been replaced by:

• digital cameras (and online photo sharing)
• USB memory sticks
• sat nav and online maps
• smartphones (Blackberries, iPhones, etc)
• DVDs and BluRay
• MP3 and downloads

And what will be obsolete or in terminal decline by 2019? How about:

• USB memory sticks (and other storage devices) replaced by online storage (such as DropBox).
• personal sat nav devices replaced by turn-by-turn navigation on mobiles.
• chequebooks (and maybe even cash) replaced by micropayment methods.
• DVD and BluRay replaced by on-demand services. The BBC iPlayer is just two years old and now serves over 80 million programmes a month.
• Software on PCs replaced by software-as-a-service: applications hosted online and accessed via your web browser.

Social media

The second half of the noughties, and the past couple of years in particular, has seen an explosion in the use and participation in social media. Facebook now boasts over 350,000,000 users – half of whom log in to their account at least once a day. Often quoted, but impressive nevertheless, is the statistic that if Facebook were a country it would be third only to China and India in the size of its population.

Hair straighteners

In compiling my content for the radio slot I asked my Twitter followers for their ideas (thanks @jonmoss, @squiggle, @sc_r, @mattseward, @strawbleu, @johnpopham and @azp74).

You can see from my profile pic that I have no use for them, but thanks go to @leedsgrub for tipping me off to the miracle that is GHD hair straighteners. According to Katie

Before ceramic straighteners, you either had to use straighteners that didnt really work or spend ages blow drying. Having GHDS has revolutionised hair fashion, as super straight styles were never achievable before that.

I’ll just have to take her word on that…

What about you?

What technological change in this decade has had the biggest impact of your life and what are you looking forward to in the next decade? Leave your comments below.

It looks likely that only the ad in the top position will be eligible for sitelinks and the ad needs to have a very high Quality Score.

Is it worth it?

To decide if it’s worth increasing your bids to get this top spot, you need to consider:

• Is your Quality Score as high as possible? (Preferably 10/10)
• How much do you need to bid to get the top spot and what is your cost-per-conversion at this price?
• Does that cost-per-conversion make sense, given your margins on this product / service?

(If you’re not sure what those stats are, you need to dig into your AdWords and Analytics data to find out.)

If those numbers add up, you should definitely experiment with sitelinks to see what effect they have on your results. Adding sitelinks costs you nothing – you still only pay for the clicks you receive whether it’s the main link or one of the sitelinks. If a user clicks on more than one of your links in the ad, Google will class the second and subsequent clicks as fraudulent and not charge you for them.

How to set up sitelinks

Take a look through your account and see which ads are likely to qualify for sitelinks. In each campaign you need to:

• look for for Ad extensions under Settings  > Networks, devices and extensions (if you don’t see the option it means this campaign isn’t eligible yet)
• check to see which keywords have a high Quality Score and are already appearing in the top position most of the time (average position less than 1.5)
• consider if those keywords could have multiple relevant landing pages on your site. In the example above, a user searching for Staying Cool might want to book an apartment in any one of the four cities they operate

You have (a generous) 35 charcter limit on the link text, but keep the link simple and easy to understand.

What to choose as sitelinks

Some ideas for what to choose as sitelinks:

• cities in which you operate, if you are location-based business
• key product lines that carry the same brand name as each other
• different services that you offer
• seasonal lines
• special offers
• pages that are relevant at different stages of the buying cycle (research, price comparison, purchase…)

What’s missing

There doesn’t seem to be an easy way to measure the number of clicks from each of the sitelinks or track the performance thereafter. You’ll be able to set up custom segments within Google Analytics, but it would be better if Google added some basic data to their AdWords reports.

Have you tried using sitelinks in your adverts yet? What results have you acheived? Any more ideas for creative ways to use them? Let me know in the comments.

First, they introduced the subtly highlighted box above the organic results, reserved for up to three advertisers who achieve a sufficiently high Quality Score:

Next they added locations:

Then it was the Google Checkout logo to advertisers who accept payment that way:

And now we’re starting to see two new additions: site links and product results.

Site links have been an element of organic results for a while now, but I’ve not seen them in paid links before today (thanks @savamaloy and @judithlewis for the tweets).

Google have reportedly been testing product links for a while now, but it’s only very recently that I’ve seen them in the UK results:

None of my clients have this feature enabled in their accounts yet, so I can’t gauge what effect product links have on CTR or conversions, but discussions around the web seem to indicate that not many searchers actually click on the [+] button to expand the listing.

This feature prompts some interesting questions:

• How will Google charge for a click on the [+]?
• Will they devise some measurement that’s more than an impression but less than a click?
• Will a click on the [+] but no subsequent click-through harm the advertiser’s Quality Score more or less than simply incurring an impression without a click?

I wonder whether this move away from the simple design principles that have served them so well (see Simplicity is Powerful) so far are being compromised in the quest for extra revenue. If they are, how will searchers respond – will they flee to the competition?

I guess it was only a matter of time before they started enriching the content of ads within the ’search network’ (they’ve offered various ad formats, including image and video, within the content network for a while).

I’m sure that ads with images are likely to attract a higher click-through-rate than pure text ads, and a higher CTR leads to a lower cost-per-click.

It will be really interesting to see how searchers respond to the new look, as the unobtrusive nature of Google’s pay-per-click ads (along with their clear labeling as ’sponsored links’) was one of the reasons for their early success.Google enhance

A Microsoft employee (working in his own time) has developed a ‘blind taste’ challenge where you compare the results from three search engines: Google, Yahoo! and the recently launched Bing. You choose your favourite set of results to reveal which search engine they came from. The results can be surprising. In my tests I found that I preferred Bing’s results almost as often as Google’s, with Yahoo! coming in a poor third.

Microsoft’s strategy with Bing seems to be working. Three weeks on from its launch, they have maintained their market share of 12% in the US (it’s lower in the UK). Microsoft’s Steve Ballmer spoke this week of the company’s plans to invest a massive 5 -  10% of its operating income over the next five years, citing their investment and subsequent success of Xbox as the model.

But here’s my advice to Microsoft: sort out the basics. A search on Google for Microsoft’s adCenter (their competitor to Google’s AdWords) brings up the following result.

Have they learned nothing? They really need to improve:

• cross-browser compatibility (you can’t access adCenter using Safari);
• the user interface (adCenter is clunky, badly structured and has no offline tools like AdWords Editor); and
• the description that other search engines display in their snippet (tell me why I need to use adCenter).

What’s your take?

• Have you used Bing? Did you like the results?
• What about Microsoft adCenter? Have you found it worth the time and effort for the volume of business it generates?

Leave your thoughts in the comments.

Like many people, I wasted a couple of hours looking around places I know spent some time researching the product. The detail and quality of the images is quite incredible (even if the face recognition software sometimes blurs out the wrong thing). Whilst oo-ing and ah-ing over it with some of my coworkers, we discussed what motivates Google to invest in products like this and how they plan to make any money out of the service (or any of its other free offerings).

Big Hairy Audacious Goal

Google’s Big Hairy Audacious Goal is to “Organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful”. A pretty ambitious task, but when you see results such as Street View it really hits home just how serious they are about this mission. (And look what happens to companies if their goal isn’t ambitious enough: Microsoft have pretty much succeeded in their goal of “A computer on every desk and in every home” and look how they’re floundering these days, with competitors beating them at every turn.)

But Google’s real goal, of course, is to make money. So how might they ‘monetize’ Street View?

They are positioning themselves as the place to go when searching for anything and the more often they get people visiting Google as their first choice search engine, the more revenue they will earn from advertising that is displayed alongside the regular results. Street View is incredibly useful – imagine being able to find out what your destination looks like before you visit somewhere for the first time – and I think Google are going to attract a lot of people to Street View.

I wouldn’t be surprised if we soon start to see advertisers being offered the opportunity to buy listings within Street View. Google already offer pay-per-click within Google Maps (they’re called local listings) and show up amongst the organic map results. I think we’ll see new opportunities for advertisers within Street View itself, which will be a more immersible experience than the standard page of search results (the so-called Ten Blue Links).

How about if you could ‘walk’ down a street and:

• check the menu of a restaurant, view the interior and reserve a table, all from within Street View
• view the special offers that a shop is running before you set off into town
• visit the cinema to see what films are showing today
• plan where you will pick up your coffee on the route from the station to your meeting

All of these businesses could embed content into the Street View such as photos, videos and discount coupons (user-created content is already appearing in Google Maps; select to view it in the ‘more’ menu).

Add user-generated content to Google Maps

How do you see Google making money out of Street View?