Wednesday, April 6, 2011

Googland

Googland

[G] AdWords Position Preference feature is being retired

Posted: 05 Apr 2011 02:45 PM PDT

Inside AdWords: AdWords Position Preference feature is being retired

In early May, we'll be retiring the position preference bidding feature in AdWords. If you're using position preference, we recommend that you disable the feature in your campaigns prior to that date to ensure a smooth transition for your bids. For instructions on how to disable position preference, please see our Help Center.

More specifically, you can expect to see the following changes in your account:
  • As of today, April 5th, position preference can no longer be enabled for campaigns through either the AdWords web interface or the API. Campaigns already using position preference will still have it enabled, but if you turn position preference off in one of your campaigns, you won't be able to turn it back on.
  • Starting in early May, we'll begin disabling position preference for any campaigns still using it.
  • After you disable position preference (either manually or when the feature is retired starting in early May), the manual maximum CPC bids for those campaigns will be the bids position preference used most recently. Position preference tries to raise or lower your bids to target the positions you specify. So using the most recent position preference bid as your manual maximum CPC should minimize disruption to your traffic.

Before you disable position preference, we recommend that you export your manual bids by downloading a keyword report to back up any bids you set before you turned on position preference. This report will include keyword-level maximum CPC bids.

What are my alternatives to position preference?

If you'd like to target specific ad positions, we recommend that you first read this blog post from our Chief Economist, Hal Varian, on some of the pitfalls around targeting average position.

After reading the blog post, if you'd still like to target specific ad positions, we recommend that you try using automated rules. Using this feature, you can set an automated rule for your campaign that will change your bid if your average position differs from your target. For more information on how to use this feature, please see this article.

We appreciate your understanding and your continued support of AdWords.

Posted by Lisa Shieh, Inside AdWords crew
URL: http://adwords.blogspot.com/2011/04/adwords-position-preference-feature-is.html

[G] Introducing free phone support for AdWords advertisers

Posted: 05 Apr 2011 02:45 PM PDT

Inside AdWords: Introducing free phone support for AdWords advertisers

We've worked hard to keep in touch with our AdWords customers and we're always looking for new ways to support you. Currently we offer email and online support, and today we're launching free phone support for all of our U.S. and Canada-based AdWords customers. When you have a question about your account or advertising campaigns, you can now call an AdWords specialist if you prefer.

We're adding phone support for a simple reason: you asked for it! You told us that while you appreciate online resources like our AdWords Help Center, you also want the option to get live, expert support when you need it. We heard you, and got to work assembling a team of AdWords experts to answer your calls.

The new phone option is one of many tools that can help you succeed with AdWords—and (most importantly!) find even more customers. You can also email us, or learn from other advertisers in the AdWords Help Forum. Our AdWords Online Classroom offers free online courses on a wide variety of AdWords topics, from the basics to great tips to take your account to the next level.

To speak to one of our specialists, give us a call at 1-866-2-Google between Monday-Friday, 9am-8pm Eastern Time. This number is for current AdWords advertisers only, so please make sure you have your customer ID ready. We look forward to speaking to you and learning more about your business.

We will roll phone support out to international advertisers in the coming months.


Posted by Francoise Brougher, VP, Global Advertising and Product Operations
URL: http://adwords.blogspot.com/2011/04/introducing-free-phone-support-for.html

[G] Music Tuesday: YouTube’s budding music stars and more

Posted: 05 Apr 2011 11:53 AM PDT

YouTube Blog: Music Tuesday: YouTube's budding music stars and more

It's no secret that YouTube is home to a burgeoning number of musicians who nurture their talent with the help of the online community. Over the years, we've developed ways for musicians to get more engaged -- with us and with the community. But often, at the end of the day, it's the musicians themselves who create their own opportunities. Sometimes the most interesting work comes from people who sharpen their chops by covering the big names...until that fateful day when they branch out and start writing their own songs.

This month, we're featuring four music partners who embody that spirit. Some, like garrethdavis and rosafrancescamusic, are young musicians honing their craft in the public eye. Rosa came to our attention for her subtle renderings of Joanna Newsom songs; we were thrilled to discover she also writes her own. The Dublin-based Garreth snagged our attention with his Everything Series, which sees him regularly uploading songs-in-progress about everything from love to the Irish elections.

The ceaselessly charismatic Todrick Hall seems to be most inspired when he's paying homage to the chain stores that are ubiquitous in our lives -- and he delights in choreographing real-life Glee moments in which people break out into song in the middle of Wal-Mart. Meanwhile, Joseph Raciti is proving to be as talented at his choral audio quilts as he is with his piano-driven pop songs. (Joseph's currently at work on his second musical, which he plans to release on YouTube.)

All of them are adding their voices to the cacophonous chorus that is YouTube -- and we treasure them for it. We think you will, too.



If that's not enough music for you, check out our other features this week: a playlist from French electro-pop sensation Yelle (flanked by android bodyguards from outer space, apparently) and an amazing new video from Israeli phenomenon Kutiman, the artist who crafts songs using YouTube videos as his source material. Prepare to be stunned.



Sarah Bardeen, Music Community Manager, recently watched "Learn how to audition for the Tupac online casting call with DJ Skee."


URL: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/youtube/PKJx/~3/Nu4H0NWa3BA/music-tuesday-youtubes-budding-music.html

[G] Real-time traffic graphs for the Transparency Report

Posted: 05 Apr 2011 10:15 AM PDT

Official Google Blog: Real-time traffic graphs for the Transparency Report

When we introduced the Transparency Report last year, we promised to keep looking for new and useful ways to display data about traffic to our services. In response to your requests, today we're adding graphs for each region that show traffic patterns for all products in aggregate. These graphs will show data with a five-minute delay.

In this graph, for example, you'll see that all of our services in Egypt were down from January 27 to February 1:


Starting today, you won't have to sift through every single product graph to figure out if one or more services are inaccessible. You'll get a snapshot up front. We've also added annotations for historical anomalies that we've seen in the traffic to our services. To see the graph for each cited incident, just click on the corresponding link.

As the Transparency Engineering team lead, part of my job is to ensure that we find, uncover and visualize datasets within Google that can help inform research and analysis on important topics. We believe that providing the facts can spark useful debate about the scope and authority of policy decisions around the globe.

We'll continue to iterate, and we hope that the Report will help shed light on the accessibility and patterns of traffic to our services around the world.

Posted by Matt Braithwaite, Transparency Engineering Team Lead
URL: http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2011/04/real-time-traffic-graphs-for.html

[G] There’s no place like home for math education

Posted: 05 Apr 2011 09:39 AM PDT

Official Google Blog: There's no place like home for math education

Last month, we mobilized a small but enthusiastic band of Google engineers to visit schools across the county as part of National Engineers Week. Googlers talked to kids about their career experiences and how they became engineers. The school visits also provided Googlers with an opportunity to get away from their desks and connect with a classroom of students. One group traveled right down the road from our headquarters to visit our local schools in Mountain View, Calif.

This volunteering program is part of our broader effort to help develop and inspire the next generation of engineers and computer scientists. And we want to make sure we're helping that happen not only around the world, but also in our own neighborhood.

In that spirit, we're awarding a $1 million grant to the Mountain View Whisman School District (K-8) to help improve math achievement for its students. Math education is critical not only to computer science and engineering careers, but to academic success overall.

My daughter and I have a bedtime routine where we read a story and also make up mathematical word problems that we solve together. I believe it's important to teach her math and problem-solving skills that she can apply broadly. And developing these skills early on is crucial. In fact, a recent education report noted that understanding math concepts in early school years may be a more important predictor of future achievement than reading skills. We want to help level the playing field and ensure all students in our community are getting a strong foundation in math, so this grant will help deliver resources and strategies to support students who are struggling in the subject.

As a Googler and the proud parent of a child in the Mountain View Whisman School District, I'm thrilled about this news. Mountain View has been a great home for Google and we're pleased to be able to support our hometown.

Posted by Roni Zeiger, Chief Health Strategist and parent
URL: http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2011/04/theres-no-place-like-home-for-math.html

[G] Free phone support for AdWords advertisers

Posted: 05 Apr 2011 09:39 AM PDT

Official Google Blog: Free phone support for AdWords advertisers

We've worked hard to keep in touch with our AdWords customers and we're always looking for new ways to support you. Currently we offer email and online support, and today we're introducing free phone support for all of our U.S.- and Canada-based AdWords customers. When you have a question about your account or advertising campaigns, you can now call an AdWords specialist if you prefer.

We're adding phone support for a simple reason: you asked for it! You told us that while you appreciate online resources like our AdWords Help Center, you also want the option to get live, expert support when you need it. We heard you, and got to work assembling a team of AdWords experts to answer your calls.

The new phone option is one of many tools that can help you succeed with AdWords—and (most importantly!) find even more customers. You can also email us, or learn from other advertisers in the AdWords Help Forum. Our AdWords Online Classroom offers free online courses on a wide variety of AdWords topics, from the basics to great tips to take your account to the next level.

To speak to one of our specialists, give us a call at 1-866-2Google between Monday-Friday, 9am-8pm Eastern Time. This number is for current AdWords advertisers only, so please make sure you have your customer ID ready. We look forward to speaking to you and learning more about your business.

We'll roll phone support out to advertisers in other countries in the coming months.

Posted by Francoise Brougher, VP, Global Advertising and Product Operations
URL: http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2011/04/free-phone-support-for-adwords.html

[G] Google Crisis Response: a small team tackling big problems

Posted: 05 Apr 2011 07:38 AM PDT

Official Google Blog: Google Crisis Response: a small team tackling big problems

This is the latest post in our series profiling entrepreneurial Googlers working on products across the company and around the world. Speed in execution is important for any Google product team, but as we learned after the recent earthquakes in both Japan and New Zealand, it's even more critical in crisis response. This post is an inside look at the efforts of our year-old Crisis Response team, and what they're doing to make preparedness tools available to anyone at the click of a button. - Ed.

The Google Crisis Response Team came together in 2010 after a few engineers and I realized that we needed a scalable way to make disaster-related information immediately available and useful in a crisis. Until a little over a year ago, we responded to crises with scattered 20 percent time projects, but after the Haiti earthquake in January 2010 we saw the opportunity to create a full-time team that would make critical information more accessible during disaster situations.

For us to help during a crisis, it's vital to get things done really quickly, and we've been able to do that as a small team within Google. Working from a standard already developed by one of the Google engineers, Person Finder was built and launched in 72 hours after the Haitian earthquake, and it launched within three hours after the New Zealand earthquake in February. Unfortunately, there have been an unusually high number of disasters over the last year, forcing us to learn and get even faster.

Within minutes of hearing about the 9.0 magnitude earthquake off the coast of Japan in March, Googlers around the world—from engineers to webmasters to product managers—immediately started organizing a Google Crisis Response resource page with disaster-related information such as maps and satellite imagery, Person Finder and news updates and citizen videos on YouTube. In Japan, Person Finder went live within an hour of the earthquake. More than 600,000 contact entries have been made since then—more than all other disasters combined—and there have been several reports of people finding their loved ones safe. I was inspired by my colleagues' ability to launch tools about an hour after the earthquake struck; the Tokyo office, in particular, has really been helping to drive the rapid response and provided real-time information to teams across the globe, even while aftershocks were rocking the city and buildings were still swaying.


But we're eager to find other ways of helping. In addition to these efforts focused on specific situations, we've worked hard this past year to more broadly organize the information most helpful during crisis situations and make it possible for people to use that data in near real-time. If people are asking for information, then in our view, it's already too late. In these situations, it's incredibly important that things happen fast.

So in addition to building products, we collaborate with many incredible organizations to make technology useful for responding to a crisis. For example, Random Hacks of Kindness is a collaboration between technology companies and government organizations which encourages teams around the world to create software solutions to problems that arise during a crisis. Recent "RHoKstars" have created all sorts of useful tools—from HeightCatcher, which helps identify malnourishment of children in relief camps by accurately assessing height and weight through a mobile device, to new features for Person Finder, such as email notifications, automatic translation and phonetic name matching—which have all been extremely useful in Japan. These projects present a real opportunity to improve lives by employing crowd-sourcing technology and real-time data during a crisis.

The sheer number of major natural disasters in 2010 and early 2011 demonstrates just how important it is for those involved in relief efforts to have real-time access to information no matter where they are. The Google Crisis Response team has worked over the past year to develop open source initiatives that encourage collaboration with larger crisis response efforts, including relief organizations, NGOs and individual volunteers. And although we're a small team and still relatively new to the crisis response ecosystem, we hope the resources and support we receive from Google and our community partners around the world will make a difference in preparedness efforts.

Posted by Prem Ramaswami, Product Manager, Google Crisis Response Team
URL: http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2011/04/google-crisis-response-small-team.html
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