Tuesday, October 4, 2011

Googland

Googland

[G] Ads quality improvements rolling out globally

Posted: 04 Oct 2011 03:53 AM PDT

Inside AdWords: Ads quality improvements rolling out globally

When searching on Google, users appreciate results that are relevant and deliver a great experience after they click. In August, we announced trials in Brazil, Spanish-speaking Latin America, Spain, and Portugal1 that increased the weight given to relevance and landing page quality in determining Quality Score and how ads are ranked on Google. The goal was to improve the user experience with search ads. Based on the results we've been seeing, we're now rolling these changes out globally over the coming weeks.

As the changes roll out, some campaigns will see variation in keyword Quality Scores and typical ad position. Within a couple weeks, things should stabilize and we expect most campaigns will not see a significant change in overall performance.

Just like today, campaigns with better-performing ads for user queries will continue to see higher Quality Scores, lower average cost per click and higher position on results pages. The 1-10 Quality Score in the AdWords interface will continue to represent the general quality of your keyword when exactly matching a search on Google. Increases in bid and Quality Score will continue to increase Ad Rank. And the same basic approach to improving your results with AdWords applies.

Posted by Adam Juda, Group Product Manager, Ads Quality

1Google Translate versions of the local Inside AdWords announcements: Brazil, Spanish-speaking Latin America, Spain, Portugal.
URL: http://adwords.blogspot.com/2011/10/ads-quality-improvements-rolling-out.html

[G] Ads are just answers

Posted: 04 Oct 2011 03:53 AM PDT

Inside AdWords: Ads are just answers

(Cross-posted from the Official Google Blog)

When CafePress first started printing shirts in 1999, online retail was still a nascent industry and Google had yet to sell its first ad. Soon CafePress started selling products through search ads on Google, and their business took off. Today, CafePress hosts millions of shops online where customers can choose from more than 325 million products on nearly any topic, from wall art to phone cases.

Just as CafePress has broadened its offerings over time, we've also worked to improve and expand our search advertising products. What started as three lines of simple text has evolved into ads that are multimedia-rich, location-aware and socially-amplified.

Today CafePress uses Sitelinks to direct people to specific pages of their website, helping customers find what they're looking for faster. On average, ads with three rows of links, or three-line Sitelinks, are more than 50 percent likely to get clicked on than ads without Sitelinks. More than 200,000 advertisers have joined CafePress in using Sitelinks in at least one campaign.


Monday at Advertising Week in New York City, I'll be talking about how advertisers have been quick to adopt these new formats since we first began experimenting nearly two years ago. Businesses from the smallest retailer in Idaho to the largest Fortune 500 company in New York have seen how these innovations in search advertising can help grow successful businesses. In fact, roughly one-third of searches with ads show an enhanced ad format.

Here are a few ways these new ad formats are helping people find valuable information faster:

Visual. Not only can you find theater times for a new movie, you can watch the trailer directly in the ad. Media ads put the sight, sound and motion of video into search ads. With Product Ads, people can see an image, price and merchant name, providing a more visual shopping experience. Because this format is often so useful, people are twice as likely to click on a Product Ad as they are to click on a standard text ad in the same location, and today, hundreds of millions of products are available through Product Ads.


Local. More than 20 percent of desktop searches on Google are related to location. On mobile, this climbs to 40 percent. Location-aware search ads can help you find what you're looking for more easily by putting thousands of local businesses on the map—literally. More than 270,000 of our advertisers use Location Extensions to attach a business address on at least one ad campaign, connecting more than 1.4 million locations in the U.S. via ads. And, with our mobile ad formats, not only can you call a restaurant directly from the ad, you can also find out how far away the restaurant is located and view a map with directions.


Social. With the +1 button people are able to find and recommend businesses with their friends. Since introducing the +1 button earlier this year, we now have more than 5 billion impressions on publisher sites a day. If you're a business owner, the +1 button enables your customers to share your products and special offers easily with their network of friends, amplifying your existing marketing campaigns.


We're continuing to experiment with search ads to help businesses like CafePress grow by connecting with the right customers. Starting today, you can drop by our site to check out what's new with search ads and learn about all the improvements we've been working on recently.


We're developing ads that provide richer information to you because we believe that search ads should be both beautiful and informative, and as useful to you as an answer.

Posted by Nick Fox, Vice President of Product Management
URL: http://adwords.blogspot.com/2011/10/ads-are-just-answers.html

[G] Experience the new look of Docs and Sites

Posted: 03 Oct 2011 06:29 PM PDT

The Google Apps Blog: Experience the new look of Docs and Sites

Starting today, we're rolling out the new design for Google Docs and Sites to everyone.

We began rolling out these improvements in early August with the documents list and have since upgraded our entire collaboration suite. You may have noticed that our new look matches other recent Google visual updates, which aim to bring a consistent, improved experience across our products.

Your content is what's important, and we aim to highlight it with this new design. You'll see clean menus and toolbars, prominent action buttons, and colorful presence that pops when you're editing with others.


To people who opted-in to try the new look — thank you. Based on your feedback, here are some of the improvements we made:
  • We made it clearer that your document is always saved, by showing "Saving..." right after you make a change and then "All changes saved" once it's fully saved.

  • We added an icon to the Share button so you can tell if your document is shared at a glance.

  • If you're looking for options that were previously under the Share button (e.g. "Email as attachment..."), you can now find these in the File menu.

  • By default, the documents list automatically fits a comfortable number of documents on your screen (large desktop monitors show more, smaller laptop screens show fewer). We also added density options to give you more control:
If you're not quite ready for the new look, choose Help > Use the classic look (or in the gear menu, for some products). We'll support the classic look for at least a few more weeks, but encourage you to use the new look, get settled in, and send us any feedback you have.

We hope you enjoy this refreshed experience.

Posted by: Vance Vagell, User Interface Software Engineer
URL: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/GoogleAppsBlog/~3/SiJDcpYiMs0/experience-new-look-of-docs-and-sites.html

[G] Google Summer of Code students shine with HelenOS

Posted: 03 Oct 2011 06:29 PM PDT

Google Open Source Blog: Google Summer of Code students shine with HelenOS

This year HelenOS, an operating system based on a multiserver microkernel design originating from Charles University, Prague, had the privilege of becoming a mentoring organization in the Google Summer of Code program. Our preparation began a couple of months before mentoring organizations started submitting their applications, but the real fun hit us when we were accepted as a mentoring organization and when the students started sending us their project proposals.

We put together about a dozen ideas for student projects and received about twenty or so official proposals. HelenOS had three mentors and we were thrilled to be given three student slots for our first year in the program. During the student application period we received a lot of patches from candidate students determined to prove their motivation and ability to work with us. It was no coincidence that the three students we chose submitted some of the most interesting patches and did the most thorough research. Two students sent us enough material to seriously attack the first milestones of their respective projects and the third student fixed several bugs, one of them on the MIPS architecture.

The three selected students were Petr Koupy, Oleg Romanenko and Jiri Zarevucky. Petr and Jiri worked on related projects focused on delivering parts of the C compiler toolchain to HelenOS while also improving our C library and improving compatibility with C and POSIX standards. Oleg chose to further extend our FAT file system server by implementing support for FAT12, FAT32, long file name extension and initial support for the exFAT file system.

When the community bonding period began and we started regular communication with our students, all three mentors, Martin Decky, Jiri Svoboda and Jakub Jermar, noticed an interesting phenomenon. Our students seemed a little shy at first, preferring one-on-one communication with their mentor, as opposed to more open communication on the mailing list. This bore some signs of the students expecting the same kind of interaction a student receives while working on a school project with a single supervisor and evaluator. Even though not entirely unexpected, this was not exactly how we intended for the students to communicate with the HelenOS team but we eventually managed to change this trend.

In short, all three of our students were pretty much technically trouble-free and met their mid-term and final milestones securely. To our relief, this was thanks to the students' skills rather than projects being too easy. Two of our students were geographically close to their mentors so Jiri and Petr attended one or two regular HelenOS onsite project meetings held in Prague.

Besides the regular monthly team meetings, the HelenOS developers met for an annual coding week event called HelenOS Camp. This year the camp took place during the last coding week of the program and we were excited that one of our Google Summer of Code students, Petr Koupy, was able to join us for the event and hack with the rest of the HelenOS team.

Shortly after Google Summer of Code ended we merged contributions of all three students to our development branch, making their work part of the future HelenOS 0.5.0 release.

Below is a screencast showing HelenOS in its brand new role of a development platform, courtesy of Petr Koupy.



By Jakub Jermar, HelenOS Org Administrator and Mentor for Google Summer of Code


URL: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/GoogleOpenSourceBlog/~3/CsK67YgLW0I/google-summer-of-code-students-shine.html

[G] Experience the new look of Docs and Sites

Posted: 03 Oct 2011 11:55 AM PDT

Docs Blog: Experience the new look of Docs and Sites

Starting today, we're rolling out the new design for Google Docs and Sites to everyone.

We began rolling out these improvements in early August with the documents list and have since upgraded our entire collaboration suite. You may have noticed that our new look matches other recent Google visual updates, which aim to bring a consistent, improved experience across our products.

Your content is what's important, and we aim to highlight it with this new design. You'll see clean menus and toolbars, prominent action buttons, and colorful presence that pops when you're editing with others.


To people who opted-in to try the new look — thank you. Based on your feedback, here are some of the improvements we made:
  • We made it clearer that your document is always saved, by showing "Saving..." right after you make a change and then "All changes saved" once it's fully saved.

  • We added an icon to the Share button so you can tell if your document is shared at a glance.

  • If you're looking for options that were previously under the Share button (e.g. "Email as attachment..."), you can now find these in the File menu.

  • By default, the documents list automatically fits a comfortable number of documents on your screen (large desktop monitors show more, smaller laptop screens show fewer). We also added density options to give you more control:
If you're not quite ready for the new look, choose Help > Use the classic look (or in the gear menu, for some products). We'll support the classic look for at least a few more weeks, but encourage you to use the new look, get settled in, and send us any feedback you have.

We hope you enjoy this refreshed experience.

Posted by: Vance Vagell, User Interface Software Engineer
URL: http://googledocs.blogspot.com/2011/10/experience-new-look-of-docs-and-sites.html

[G] Prepare for the upcoming holiday season with placement targeting

Posted: 03 Oct 2011 11:55 AM PDT

Inside AdSense: Prepare for the upcoming holiday season with placement targeting

With the holidays right around the corner, premium brand-name AdWords advertisers are preparing for the season by increasing their marketing budgets and scheduling targeted campaigns. You can prepare too by taking advantage of placement targeting to allow advertisers to directly target your site.

While all sites are eligible for placement targeting, there are things you can do to help increase the amount of placement targeted ads on your site. First, turn your custom channels into ad placements. Be sure to fill out a well-written title and description to help potential advertisers understand the audiences they'll reach by bidding on your site. Some details to include in the description are your site name, vertical, ad position, ad size and site demographic.

Next, ensure you are using our most successful ad units and are placing them in optimal positions. Finally, claim your site in Ad Planner. Following these steps will help advertisers find your site to target and choose where to place their ads on a specific section or area. Placement targeted ads typically receive much higher RPMs, which results in higher earnings for you.

Creating targeted channels is easy and a great way to earn extra revenue, but it takes time for them to show up for advertisers, so act soon! Just follow the instructions in our Help Center. Once you've made the changes, not only will your ads be ready for this holiday season, but they'll also be targetable by advertisers for every premium campaign in the future.

Posted by Jamie Firkus, Inside AdSense team
URL: http://adsense.blogspot.com/2011/10/prepare-for-upcoming-holiday-season.html

[G] Ads are just answers

Posted: 03 Oct 2011 11:55 AM PDT

Official Google Blog: Ads are just answers

When CafePress first started printing shirts in 1999, online retail was still a nascent industry and Google had yet to sell its first ad. Soon CafePress started selling products through search ads on Google, and their business took off. Today, CafePress hosts millions of shops online where customers can choose from more than 325 million products on nearly any topic, from wall art to phone cases.

Just as CafePress has broadened its offerings over time, we've also worked to improve and expand our search advertising products. What started as three lines of simple text has evolved into ads that are multimedia-rich, location-aware and socially-amplified.

Today CafePress uses Sitelinks to direct people to specific pages of their website, helping customers find what they're looking for faster. On average, ads with three rows of links, or three-line Sitelinks, are more than 50 percent likely to get clicked on than ads without Sitelinks. More than 200,000 advertisers have joined CafePress in using Sitelinks in at least one campaign.


Monday at Advertising Week in New York City, I'll be talking about how advertisers have been quick to adopt these new formats since we first began experimenting nearly two years ago. Businesses from the smallest retailer in Idaho to the largest Fortune 500 company in New York have seen how these innovations in search advertising can help grow successful businesses. In fact, roughly one-third of searches with ads show an enhanced ad format.

Here are a few ways these new ad formats are helping people find valuable information faster:

Visual. Not only can you find theater times for a new movie, you can watch the trailer directly in the ad. Media ads put the sight, sound and motion of video into search ads. With Product Ads, people can see an image, price and merchant name, providing a more visual shopping experience. Because this format is often so useful, people are twice as likely to click on a Product Ad as they are to click on a standard text ad in the same location, and today, hundreds of millions of products are available through Product Ads.


Local. More than 20 percent of desktop searches on Google are related to location. On mobile, this climbs to 40 percent. Location-aware search ads can help you find what you're looking for more easily by putting thousands of local businesses on the map—literally. More than 270,000 of our advertisers use Location Extensions to attach a business address on at least one ad campaign, connecting more than 1.4 million locations in the U.S. via ads. And, with our mobile ad formats, not only can you call a restaurant directly from the ad, you can also find out how far away the restaurant is located and view a map with directions.


Social. With the +1 button people are able to find and recommend businesses with their friends. Since introducing the +1 button earlier this year, we now have more than 5 billion impressions on publisher sites a day. If you're a business owner, the +1 button enables your customers to share your products and special offers easily with their network of friends, amplifying your existing marketing campaigns.


We're continuing to experiment with search ads to help businesses like CafePress grow by connecting with the right customers. Starting today, you can drop by our site to check out what's new with search ads and learn about all the improvements we've been working on recently.



We're developing ads that provide richer information to you because we believe that search ads should be both beautiful and informative, and as useful to you as an answer.

Posted by Nick Fox, Vice President of Product Management
URL: http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2011/10/ads-are-just-answers.html
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