Google offers new tools to grow businesses globally

New tools to grow your business globally - Google Blog

Srinidhi Viswanatha from Global Advertisers team has posted a really interesting blog that has attracted my whole attention because it offers you to better understand Merton's Matthew effect, a particular explanation of the law of success!

Imagine you're a men's tailor in Bangkok, and you sell custom suits to travelers passing through Thailand. You start a website to sell your suits online and begin to notice that the majority of your website traffic comes from overseas. How do you respond to this international demand?

Businesses of all sizes face a number of obstacles when they want to expand internationally. First, they must identify the right market to sell their products or services, such as custom men's suits. Then they have to create versions of their website and ad campaigns in the language of the market they want to reach. Finally, and perhaps most importantly, they need to reach new customers who may be interested in their products and services.


Starting today, businesses can access a number of new resources from Google to help them overcome these obstacles and start growing internationally. We're launching a new website, calledGoogle Ads for Global Advertisers, which will serve as a central hub for Google's tools and tips for businesses looking to expand to foreign markets. This website pulls together resources for businesses to find the right market for their products and services, translate their websites and ad text, find new customers with relevant online ads, and understand options for international payment, shipping and customer service.


We're also introducing Global Market Finder, a new free tool to help businesses identify markets with high demand for their products or services. The Global Market Finder automatically translates your keyword—for example, [business suit]—into 56 languages and then uses Google search trends data to see where in the world people search for your product or service. It helps businesses evaluate new markets by showing the volume of local searches, estimated price for keywords and competition for each keyword in each market. With this tool, businesses can answer questions like "how competitive is this market?", "how does demand in one country compare to demand elsewhere in the world?" and "how much would it cost to start advertising in this new market?" You can read more about these new tools on the Inside AdWords blog.


Google has already helped hundreds of thousands of businesses reach customers in foreign markets. From a mosaic company in Lebanon to a bespoke shoe retailer in Sydney, a tech support company in India and a bed and breakfast in Poland, tools like AdWords have helped businesses reach new customers and drive traffic to their websites. We think our new website and tools will encourage even more businesses to expand internationally, whether you're a small business testing a single market for the first time or a mid-size company advertising your products to an entire region.

After all, there are more than 1.9 billion consumers online. Wouldn't you like to add some of them as customers?

For all micro-bloggers who are using twitter, Sponsored Tweets and MyLikes are great ad tools as well, I recommend to all of you!

Twitter PPC ads to appear in Google’s real time SERPs

Twitter PPC ads to appear in Google’s real time SERPs - Vertical Leap

Google’s search engine results pages (SERPs) will soon boast another form of paid search engine marketing - not in the typical AdWords slot but in ostensibly organic results. However, whilst this may seem like a breach of the company’s long-held ethics on transparency and relevancy, there is one caveat: these ads are from an entirely different network – Twitter.

According to a report in Marketing Magazine, Twitter’s new sponsored search feature – “Promoted Tweets” – are expected to appear in Google’s SERPs alongside other tweets in the real-time search service, Updates.

This will mark the first time that Google has allowed ads from other networks to appear in its search listings and could potentially be seen as a betrayal of their previous clear distinction between advertising and search results.

However any such criticism would seem somewhat unfounded, as Promoted Tweets appear in this format in any Twitter search results – and Google Updates is, effectively, simply delivering results from that internal search engine to a wider audience.

Marketing Magazine reports that Google and Twitter are believed to share the revenue generating from the PPC-basis Promoted Tweets when they are displayed in Google-powered SERPs. This tie-up has been called a “breakthrough” by Nick Jones, managing director of I Spy Marketing.

“Twitter is pioneering advertising against short-form content, so it was a natural starting place for us,” said a spokeswoman for Google, adding that the company was always willing to explore other advertising models and systems.

Google Phases Out “Sponsored Links” Adopts New Name For Ads: “Ads”

Google Phases Out “Sponsored Links” Adopts New Name For Ads: “Ads” - eBrandz Search Marketing & Technology News

San Francisco -- Attempting to bring some innovation to its advertizing structure, Internet search engine titan Google has now finished unfolding a mostly cosmetic change but an important one nonetheless. The paid search results on Google.com are now designated as “Ads” rather than “Sponsored Links.”

This does not alter anything in the way the ads are selected or displayed, but it is an interesting modification if only because the “Sponsored Links” description has been used for a very long time.

Search Engine Land's Barry Schwartz, who first discovered that most people were seeing the “Ads” label rather than “Sponsored Links” got a confirmation from Google.

“Yes, I can confirm this rollout. We are always experimenting with the look and feel of our search result pages, including the delivery of relevant advertising. This is on English language domains now and rolling out to all languages and domains,” a Google spokesperson said.

The modification, obviously, only affects English language domains, since other languages are going to have different names for the feature. Also, it is interesting to note that the change is only for ads on the main Google search engine and not for the other Google products which feature ads, meaning most of them.

Google commenced experimenting with the new name about a month ago and has been unfurling the change since. Promoted Tweets, which started showing up on Google earlier this week, were labeled as “Ads” as well.

The Google Places incorporation and various local ads contribute to the weakening of the “Sponsored Links” term. Another reason for the alteration could be that Google found that the term “Ads” performed better, in terms of user interaction and, therefore, revenue, than “Sponsored Links.”

Bing named their ads “Sponsored Sites” and Yahoo “Sponsored Results.”

However, adoption of the new term may very well have to do with the fact that Google has been diversifying its ad offerings and has not been relying on text ads as much as before.

Google's Economic Impact in 2009 in the United States of America

Google is not just a search engine, but also  an engine of economic growth. Google's U.S. economic impact in 2009 was $54 billion. 


Claire Johnson, Vice President for Global Online Sales and Hal Varian, our Chief Economist, talk about Google's economic impact in 2009 and where we get the numbers.

Download the report

Google has recently introduced Search Stories, that SwissNet, Inc. had the pleasure to test for you!


Get inspired by Google's Search Stories and create your own!

Have fun!

How to Integrate Paid Search and Social Media for Better Marketing Results

Matt Lawson is director of marketing for Marin Software, provider of the leading enterprise-class paid search management application for advertisers and agencies.


Paid search and social media are both extremely important marketing channels. But how can brands combine the two distinctly different tactics, the bid-based, conversion-obsessed, ROI-driven world of paid search and the experimental, brand-building, hard-to-measure world of social, to drive an overall increase in ROI? Marketers large and small are grappling with the challenge of how to integrate their paid search advertising programs with social media programs on networks like Facebook, Twitter, blogs, and viral video sites.

Social and Search Should Work Together

The most important thing to remember when starting a search-and-social integration program is that search and social each provide different benefits to your business, so you should leverage their strengths instead of trying to get them to deliver results that aren’t suited to the medium.

Marketers usually participate in social media to create an active dialogue with consumers around their products and services, with the main goal of building brand value, and a secondary goal of driving sales. On the other hand, marketers use paid search primarily to drive sales, leads, and conversion, and don’t expect the short text of their paid search ads to do much for branding.

But together, the two disciplines can increase the value that each program delivers. By creating social content that attracts an engaged audience, marketers can then craft targeted paid search campaigns to “capture” this audience and turn them into buyers.

As an example of how this works, consider these findings from an October 2009 study conducted by GroupM Search, M80, and ComScore. The report found that consumers exposed to a brand’s social media content are 2.8 times more likely to search on that brand’s terms. What’s more, consumers exposed to social media are more likely to perform deeper searches, going further down the purchase funnel and completing more purchases. Consumers exposed to a brand’s social media are 1.7 times more likely to search with the intention of making a purchase, and, overall, brands reported a 50% lift in click-through rates from consumers exposed to both social media and paid search, according to the study.

What these statistics show is that stronger brand awareness through social media helps drive paid search effectiveness in three ways:

• Target audiences are more likely to search (more impressions on your ads)
• Target audiences are more likely to click (more clicks on those impressions)
• Because of higher clickthrough rates, ads are placed higher on page (higher quality score)

Smart Strategies

There is no silver bullet for integrating search and social, but there are several concrete strategies every marketer can use to start bringing the two disciplines together. Here are a few tips to help you optimize social and paid search programs to work in a complimentary way to boost overall ROI.

• Make your social campaigns search-friendly. Make sure your social media programs (Facebook, Twitter, viral video, etc.) are appropriately tagged and indexed, and that metadata for pages includes your top keywords. This will allow people searching for your brand content to not only find your paid search ads and natural search results, but to find your social media content as well. The first step to building brand engagement through social activities is to enable consumers to easily find your content.
• Experiment with keyword advertising on social media sites. Facebook and YouTube both allow for keyword targeted advertising, but the way that these ads work is vastly different from how advertising works on Google or the Content Network. Facebook ads allow you to target users based on preferences they list on their profile. For example, a retailer selling DVDs would create ads that target interests such as “action movies,” “horror,” or “funny movies.” YouTube’s advertising system allows you to target specific user queries. However, remember the queries that occur on YouTube are different than those on Google, because users on YouTube are searching for content, not products. For example, people may be trying to find “Avatar trailer” or “car scene from Modern Family,” rather than searching for a particular DVD, so make sure to target your ads to these more specific types of search queries.
• Create social media-influenced paid search campaigns. Closely analyze the topics and discussions taking place around your social media campaigns, and then mine these discussions for new keywords you can use in paid search campaigns on Google, Yahoo, and Bing. Whatever people are talking about, bid on keywords that reflect these conversations. As always, you should measure the performance of these campaigns to prune non-performing ads and increase investment on terms that are more likely to capture downstream conversions. In addition, consider running controlled experiments with social media advertising turned off and on, so you can measure the impact these campaigns have on your paid search programs by observing changes in your paid search click-through and conversion rates.

By quantifying the uplift that social media delivers to your paid search programs, you can gain insights into your marketing programs that search marketers who limit their view to just one channel do not –- and improve the performance of both your paid search and social programs.

Social Media Minute: Twitter Cracks Down on Spammers, Microsoft Trials Microblogging

Social Media Minute: Twitter Cracks Down on Spammers, Microsoft Trials Microblogging

Social media moves so fast, it's hard to keep up.  It used to be that in many American households, after dinner, folks would sit down and enjoy a few hours with their favorite sitcom or drama in front of the TV. Then, when computers and broadband came around, others decided to instead spend a few hours online shopping, gaming or emailing.

Now it appears with laptops and other portable devices, more and more Americans are conducting these two past times simultaneously. Nearly 60% of Americans watch TV and use a computer at least once per month, with the average time conducting both activities around 3.5 hours.

Social networking is now creeping in to many parts of our lives, and I have seen Twitter users utilize the medium to discuss shows as they air, with conversations erupting about specific episodes, during the show! This is especially true with live events such as sports and the Grammys.

Also, with devices such as the iPad coming to market soon, this trend will surely rise.

The iPad is essentially a coffee table computer that will make it fashionable to couch surf, enabling its users to reach out to the Web while snuggled up, watching content on TV.

Microsoft Developing Twitter Like Service Dubbed OfficeTalk

Microsoft is developing and testing a new microblogging service that will rival similar offerings including Twitter and the more business-friendly Yammer. Called OfficeTalk, the service is an on-premise utility (meaning it would live on a server inside a corporate firewall, much like SharePoint) that allows co-workers and teammates to swap messages of 140 characters or less.

Each user has their very own page which looks much like a Twitter user page with a personal image, title and brief bio. You can search for other users inside your company and subscribe to their messages. Also, users can view the "Company View" which shows all messages sent out throughout a company or organization. This feature might be noisy but could also spawn some fascinating conversations across business units inside the enterprise.

It's great to see Microsoft coming to the game with OfficeTalk. This functionality seems to be a natural extension to SharePoint and would inject some benefits of the "real-time web" into the enterprise environment.

Twitter Cracking Down on Spammers

Recently, Twitter seemed to be overrun with unwanted spam messages. That is, looking at the trending topics, one could see how spammers were utilizing the real-time conversation tool to pollute and take value away from the conversations on Twitter. Spammers would routinely hijack popular terms by sending out tweets with that term and a link to a spam site.

Twitter has implemented spam safeguards starting in 2009, and the results of these steps are beginning to manifest. According to to a post on Twitter's blog, spam tweets are now down to less than 1% of all tweets sent on the service, down from around 11% in August 2009.

For Twitter to remain viable and build consistent growth, controlling spam is vitally important. The company recently started a "Trust and Safety" team and also allows users to directly report spammers when they see these types of messages. As ReadWriteWeb points out, Twitter hopes to monetize itself by selling access to the full stream of tweets to Google and Microsoft. If the stream is full of spam, this proposition becomes less attractive. One can only hope that Twitter's anti-spam measures continue to be effective.

Google Showing Hotel Prices in Google Maps

The world's largest search engine and king of online utility, Google, is considering adding more functionality to its already robust mapping solution. To aid travelers, Google is experimenting with displaying hotel prices for a group of testers.

According to Mashable, using the hotel search is quite easy: simply search for hotels in a specific region. Google Maps will then populate the map with pushpins that, when clicked, reveal the price for a nights' stay at that hotel. The data is based on advertised prices from sponsored results.

This is a new way to display hotel ads on a map. However useful, does this type of utility for geographically set hotel ads interest you, dear reader? To see another example of how this works, visit Kayak.com and search for hotels, then choose map view. These are actual hotel rates not based on specific ads from that hotel. Which, to me, is far more reliable and useful than the ad model described above.