Local.com Offers Paid Search Placement To Small Businesses

Search engines like Local.com are aiming for a bigger stake in the interactive advertising market, by offering both large and small businesses options that the giants are not offering.

Starting tomorrow, Local.com kicks off its new ‘Local Verified’ service, giving businesses the option of paying an annual fee to secure placement at the top of its localized search results.

Local.com is focused on offering businesses of all sizes multiple local search options, from standard CPMs and banners, to completely free listings.

According to comScore, almost half of consumers who used a local search Web site visited a local merchant as a result of their search behavior, highlighting the efficacy of local search as a source to drive traffic and sales.

Paying $249 for a premium listing with Local.com provides smaller businesses with a cost-effective alternative to the primary search engine's local ad models, allowing them to play with the big boys in the online ad landscape.

The free listings also serve merchants with little or no interactive marketing experience, by allowing them to post or update their business' name, description and contact info, even if they don't have a web site.

The Kelsey Group predicts local search spending to grow to $2.6 billion by 2011.

Part of the shift stems from the online behavior of the small business owners themselves, as they use search engines to find suppliers and contractors and are realizing that the Web can help customers find them too.

Source: MediaPost

Google Adds Preferred Cost Bidding To AdWords

In a response to the Advertiser’s demand for greater control over how they manage their bids and costs, Google has released a 'Preferred Cost Bidding' feature for its AdWords program. This new, global option allows advertisers to specify the average price they would like to pay per click (preferred CPC) or per thousand impressions (preferred CPM), as opposed to a maximum bid.

According to the AdWords Help Center, the preferred cost bidding system works best for advertisers who are aware of how much each click or impression is worth to their business and want their AdWords advertising costs to be more consistent among other factors. The feature also serves as a time-saver, freeing advertisers from having to constantly adjust their maximum bids.

It may be best for site owners that can contend with a possible shift in conversion rates, however, as the preferred cost bidding system removes some control over ad positioning.

So if an advertiser targets a $5 preferred CPC, the AdWords system may place an ad in a range of positions as it works to get that preferred cost, according to Google.

The option will be available to all advertisers by the end of the week, but in the blogosphere, discussions about the merits and flaws of this new feature, as well as how much control it really affords advertisers have begun.

While advertisers with SEM experience may prefer to micromanage their ads, 'Preferred Cost Bidding' seems to be a viable option for those who have don't have the time or budget to actively manage an AdWords campaign.

Source: MediaPost

Google Tips Its Hand On Voice Search

Some people read tea leaves to predict the future. Stephen Arnold reads Google patents, and right now he's focusing his attention on United States Patent 7,027,987 voice interface for a search engine.

Arnold, a Google expert who has written a book on the search leader, believes the patent is a roadmap to Google's future in voice search applications. He said the patent reveals that the company has plans to use voice search across the board for a wide variety of devices big and small and for an equally wide swath of applications ranging from voice-to-text products to a variety of telecommunications uses.

Google is optimizing voice search to run on Google's data centers. There's no limit to how they can scale it. They can embed the function on mobile phones, on browsers, on chips, and even on big mainframes. It's entirely device independent.

Google co-founder Sergey Brin has his name on the patent, which Arnold said is important because the Google executive would likely want to be associated with research that has an important future.

While the patent is replete with arcane vocabulary and schematics concerning voice-processing technology, it also has sections that clearly discuss the future. The client devices may include devices such as mainframes, minicomputers, personal computers, laptops, personal digital assistants, telephones, or the like, capable of connecting to the network. The client devices may transmit data over the network or receive data from the network via a wired, wireless, or optical connection.

The Googleplex with hundreds of thousands of processors scattered throughout Google's data centers plays a central role in the forthcoming voice search functions. Because of the power of Google's data centers, other search competitors will find it difficult to duplicate Google's voice search applications.

Processing voice is computationally intensive. The new fast processors and fast RAM are the reason the patent opens the door to do voice searches. Google now has the machine its data centers to run voice. It will likely be a network delivered service that can be used by any device with a microphone.

It doesn't take much imagination to see that Google voice search applications could operate seamlessly with many Google applications like GoogleTalk, Google Calendar, or Google Docs. Google users should be able to use the voice functions to quickly turn voice into text on Gmail and even to translate simultaneously among different foreign languages. The patent opens the door for easy spoken translation in real time.

Update by Sunny: Last week Google announced a free voice beta called Google Voice Local Search, which is a telephone information service. This could well be the way for the company's future in voice search.

Source: InformationWeek

Google to Buy DoubleClick for $3.1 Bn

Google reached an agreement with private equity firm Hellman & Friedman to buy DoubleClick for $3.1 billion in cash, the largest acquisition yet made by the Internet giant.

The addition of DoubleClick, which provides the technology to place ads on Web sites, could help Google control even more of the Internet advertising market, particularly in attracting brand ad dollars. DoubleClick has already announced plans to create an online advertising exchange that would let marketers bid for ad space on Web sites.

The pending acquisition is another blow to Microsoft, which was reportedly in talks to buy DoubleClick for $2 billion. It is also an enormous bet by Google that DoubleClick's ad-serving technology will help the company expand beyond its dominance of search and text-based Web ads into display ads favored by brand marketers.

While Google generated $10.5 billion in 2006 ad revenue, nearly all of its sales come from text listings on search results pages and elsewhere. Google's efforts to translate its search dominance into a leading position in display and video markets have so far been mostly unsuccessful.

The data going through Google could, however, give some publishers pause.

Google is going to have to be very thoughtful about how they take advantage of this installed base they have. Publishers want to be very sure of what's going where and how it's protected.

Source: Adweek

Google Bows Web Site Optimization Tool

Adding to its already enormous toolbox, Google today launches Google Website Optimizer, a product designed to help Web site owners test drive different landing pages in order to determine which designs drive the most conversions.

Depending on the type of business, those conversions might be sales, downloads of information, viewing video, and other kinds of transactions.

Website Optimizer, which was released as a closed beta in fall 2006, is integrated with Google AdWords and free to AdWords advertisers. Google considers Website Optimizer the third leg of the proverbial stool with AdWords dedicated to driving Web traffic and Google Analytics focused on measuring Web activity.

The new Website Optimizer is dedicated to converting visitors into customers and improving Web pages. The tool allows advertisers to receive up to 10,000 versions of a Web page. This tool lets you have one page, add a few Java scripts and then when visitors hit the page, there are different combinations served.

Website Optimizer allows advertisers to have one page, perhaps a home page, add some Java scripts to the page, and then be able to show visitors different versions of that page. Advertisers can then track and see which version is most effective for their purposes in terms of driving return on investment.

Source: MediaPost

Google, EchoStar Announce Automated TV Ad System

Amid mounting speculation about Google’s plans for TV advertising, the Mountain View, CA-based giant announced a groundbreaking partnership with EchoStar Communications to introduce the first automated system for buying, selling, delivering and measuring television ads on EchoStar DISH Network's 125 national satellite programming networks.

Under the agreement, Google will have access to a portion of the DISH Network's advertising inventory that spans all channels and dayparts. The national test is on an invitation-only basis to advertisers.

"Our partnership with EchoStar is important for us as we begin to offer a TV advertising platform broadly," said Google CEO Eric Schmidt in the official press statement. "We think we can add value to this important medium by delivering more relevant ads to viewers, providing better accountability for advertisers and better monetize inventory for TV operators and programmers."

Adds Michael Steib, Director of Google TV ad sales; "We will be receiving aggregated data. While being very sensitive to user privacy, we are able to learn how many households watched each ad. Specifically, we're making available second-by-second commercial measurement. The end result should be more relevance for consumers and better results for advertisers.

It develops into this digital ecosystem where we are helping the advertisers put the ads in front of the right audience and the viewer will see more and more relevant ads," added Steib.

Google has been testing the system with Astound Cable, a small cable provider, in the Concord, CA DMA.

"Ours is the only end-to-end system with auction-based pricing, full digital workflow and detailed commercial measurement to inform the advertiser and agency on the effectiveness of their campaign," said Steib.

The system is intended to add efficiency to the entire buying, selling and placing process, Steib said. It will use a Web-based system like AdWords. Advertisers will bid for inventory with an auction-based system and indicate their CPM bids. Google will run the auction--and report back in 24 hours whether the advertiser won the auction and if the ad ran, where it ran and the number of household boxes delivered.

Advertisers can then adjust their pricing based on how well creative performed in which conditions.

Participants in the beta uniformly pointed to the real-time measurement elements of the test as revolutionary because within 24 hours, advertisers will know not only what ads have been viewed, but where in the ads viewers have tuned out. Advertisers will also get to see how their ads perform in different dayparts.

To read the complete story, click here.

Source: MediaPost