Google Airs TV Ad During Super Bowl!

Last night, google aired a TV Ad during the super bowl event, known to be one of the most expensive ad spaces out there. While the actual investment is high – it is less interesting than the ‘sub text’ which clearly states and presents google to become a much more “main stream” business and not much different than other mega-brands such as Coke and others – pushing its brand and investing heavily in its positioning.

Moreover, the ad itself is very “google” – it simply presents a chain of events, needs, wants, inspirations and dilemma people may occur, and how google easily helps us get where we want, do what we want, understand our world, our partners in life a bit better.

So here goes:

For More Info:

http://www.searchengineland.com/hell-freezes-over-google-airs-super-bowl-a-35476

http://www.sportingnews.com/blog/the_sporting_blog/entry/view/54867/the_best_and_worst_super_bowl_commercials

Hitwise: Google Receives 71% Market Share in the US

hitwise
hitwise

Google is gaining market share, says Hitwise. According to Hitwise’s latest report, Google receives 71% market share of searches, while Yahoo! receives 18.26%, MSN (Live) receives 5.32%, Ask.com receives 3.45% and the remaining 46 other engines accounted for 1.95% all together.

Search Engines Market Share US 08 2008
Search Engines Market Share US 08 2008

Continue reading “Hitwise: Google Receives 71% Market Share in the US”

Google Chrome – Small step for Browser, Huge step for SEO linkbait

Google Chrome launched less than a day ago, and this has been one of the busiest days on my twitter, email and all in all web life.
I do not recall the last time the web was so obsessed with a launch of a beta product, so much conversations, expectations, opinions, buzz, hype, and web content spread in such a way.

I read the comic, read some opinions and downloaded Google Chrome last night. Indeed, it’s a neat cool fast and kinda stable browser, especially if you take into account it’s only in Beta.

But that’s not what Chrome is all about!

Google Chrome Link bait

Chrome is probably the best most successful piece of link bait campaign I saw, IMO, this is a real state of the art well planned online and offline PR move, which amazingly enough moved our entire industry the last 24 hours!!!

After all, and if we take the PR pitch and hype back to their real natural size and power, it’s a browser. It’s not an operating system (still running on windows last time I checked) and at best it will take a nice chunk of market share from Explorer and Firefox and make this life of adapting a website to browsers a bit more complicated.

But the linkbait… man this is fantastic.
So creative – going with the comics creative to make it stand out and tell us “hey, this one is not just a launch, it’s special!”
So well planned – After the “leak” to the blogosphere the media world i.e. newspapers, TV networks and of course the web got the news and everyone starting talking
The Differentiated Pitch: s it a browser? Is it an Operating system? Will it affect Microsoft? What about Firefox and their relationship?

And the results:

  • 7,850,000 Search results for “google chrome”
  • 8,117 news items on google news
  • 73,902 blog results on Google blog search
  • 1,380 videos on Google video
  • ~2,000 mentions on twitter

In a matter of hours I received dozens of emails from friends, facebook messages, IM links, twitter messages, phone calls and an ongoing discussion in our office – simply and utterly beautiful!

So for sum?

Chapeau to Google’s PR team, Chapeau to the developers for a job well done on the browser and a special chapeau to this guy who offers to sell a chrome email address on eBay 🙂 !!! (Thanks Olivier)

Google Quality Score Update

Quality Score is one term which for some people may some vague or taken from the Olympics – but for others, in the web marketing business, especially those who specialize in Pay per Click and Google AdWords Optimization – it’s one KPI we all strive to maximize. Google has announced they are rolling out a change in the Quality Score algorithms, so here goes… Continue reading “Google Quality Score Update”

Google Insights for Search – Keyword Research with a Twist

Google Insights for Search has launched today. Well, Google dudes did it again. Taking data based on the Google Trends product, and giving it the twist marketers really need, Google just launched a very interesting service called Google Insights for Search.

We’ve seen similar services from Compete, Quantcast and Hitwise, however Google’s way of presenting the data, connecting it to the keyword research world combined with the marketing segmentation by vertical, location and related searches, really brings more light into keywords research.

Google Insights for Search

Google Insights for Search is not the typical keyword research tool. It will not give you hundreds of thousands of new keyword phrases, will not give exact search volume (yet) but it will give you great insight as to trends, related searches, demographics and competitive rank for a term vs. its industry index.

So what is Google Insights for Search?

With Google Insights for Search, you can compare search volume patterns across specific regions, categories, and time frames

The information is then segmented by:

Categories: Narrow data to specific categories, like finance, health, and sports.
Seasonality: Anticipate demand for your business so you can budget and plan accordingly.
Geographic distribution: Know where to find your customers. See how search volume is distributed across regions and cities.

Google Insights for Search 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. We then show you a graph with the results, indicating interest over time, plotted on a scale from 0 to 100; the totals are indicated next to bars by the search terms.

In the following example you can see how the term “hotels in new york” can be seen differently if we’re looking at the whole world vs. only USA:

Google Insights for Search

Google Insights for Search

You can see that the trend is opposite between the two geographic segments! While in the whole world, the term used is now decreasing vs. the selected vertical, in USA it’s actually above the industry!

From the little I can see after playing with this tool, I can definitely say that Google Insights for Search delivers the promise its name hold. It provides insights for search 🙂

Enjoy…
Ophir