Thursday, October 20, 2011

Googland

Googland

[G] "So, what is it you do there at Grogel?"

Posted: 20 Oct 2011 03:39 AM PDT

Inside Google Books: "So, what is it you do there at Grogel?"

Posted by Mireya Sémelas, Google eBooks Strategist

My beloved grandmother loves to talk to others about her grandchildren and how proud she is of what each one of us has become. Although, I always worried -- actually, I had solid evidence -- that she didn't fully understand my job at Google as an eBooks Strategist.

Explaining Google to her has been a real challenge, as her daily interactions with technology are limited to the use of a phone (a landline, not even a mobile one), the washing machine and the TV. Worse, my mind used to go blank every time she asked me, "So, what is it you do there at Grogel?" I won't even get started on my efforts over the last three years trying to correct her pronunciation.

Enough was enough. I love my Nana and I wanted her to be part of what I do. I wanted to share with her not only my personal but also my professional life. Nana is a fervent reader; her shelves are filled with literary gems that have been passed down through three generations in the family. I began to think about how I could connect her interest in books with my work on Google eBooks. It would still be a challenge: as an 87-year-old, Nana would likely have trouble imagining the existence of a paper-less book.

But with this goal in mind, on my most recent visit to my family in Spain, I decided to give up trying to tell, and work on trying to show. I would help her experience firsthand the beauty of digital reading.

Nana does not speak a single word of English, so I took her online to Google Books and looked for one of the greatest contributions to Spanish literature: La Celestina. For those of you unfamiliar with this treasure, this 15th-century masterpiece marks a cultural turning point in the history of Spanish literature.


I downloaded the eBook in one click and opened it in the Web Reader on the browser. Throughout the few minutes it took to go through this simple process, Nana sat there quietly. When I finally turned to her to ask her to read a few words of the eBook, her face couldn't hide her amazement. But she read the whole first chapter out loud, the tone of her voice showing the excitement behind making this discovery. She was reading Calisto and Melibea's tragicomedy on a computer screen. She was seeing the year 1499 brought to the 21st century through the 'magic' of digital content.

Ever since that experience, instead of avoiding asking about the details of my job, Nana can't stop asking me questions about it. I think that after having her experience reading eBooks on the Web Reader, on my eReader device and on my smartphone, I am the one who is now talking proudly about my Nana to others.
URL: http://booksearch.blogspot.com/2011/10/so-what-is-it-you-do-there-at-grogel.html

[G] It’s a beautiful day for some baseball...searches, that is

Posted: 20 Oct 2011 03:38 AM PDT

Official Google Blog: It's a beautiful day for some baseball...searches, that is

These days, thanks to the movie "Moneyball," everyone is talking about evaluating baseball through the lens of data and statistics. As the World Series matchup between the Texas Rangers and the St. Louis Cardinals begins, we thought: why not take a look at what the search data says about the players, managers and other aspects of the 2011 baseball postseason?

Let's start with the teams themselves. The Cardinals are more popular in search than the Rangers. Perhaps that's because the Redbirds—not your typical underdogs with 10 World Series titles and 18 pennants—were 10 games back from the NL Wild Card in September, and have since overpowered the regular season's best Phillies, then their division mates the Brewers to win the NLCS last weekend. The Rangers are in the World Series for the second year in a row, still without a title to their name; yet searches were higher in the last months for the team they defeated in the ALCS, the Detroit Tigers, who saw an even steeper increase in search interest than the Cardinals.

The Cards are known first and foremost for their hitting, but Chris Carpenter overtook first baseman Albert Pujols for a period earlier this month after the former pitched a complete game against Philadelphia to advance his team to the NLCS.


Meanwhile, the Cardinals' breakout star, hometown hero and NLCS MVP David Freese is (as recently as our data goes) an underdog in search—outpaced in the first half of the month not only by Pujols and Carpenter but by other slugging teammates like Lance Berkman and Matt Holliday.


On the AL side, searches for the Rangers' Nelson Cruz were below those for teammates Adrian Beltre, Ian Kinsler and Josh Hamilton until October 11, when he hit the first-ever postseason walkoff grand slam, took his team to an early lead in the series against Detroit and himself to the lead in searches (for a while) as well as the MVP title.


Matching up the Rangers and Cardinals top players, we find that Albert Pujols is the subject of nearly double as many searches as Josh Hamilton. And as of October 12, Nelson Cruz had double the searches of David Freese—we're guessing that's changed a bit since Freese was named MVP on Sunday. We have our eye on the data to see how these player matchups go over the course of the series.

Famous (or infamous, depending on who you ask) St. Louis manager Tony LaRussa, who had an entire book written about his shrewd game strategy back in 2005, is more searched for than Texas manager Ron Washington, who's been at the helm since the 2007 season. But neither is as popular in search as Texas owner and Hall of Famer Nolan Ryan.


As always, there were some twists during this year's playoffs, starting with the rally squirrel—a big hit in St. Louis. The rally squirrel made two live appearances during the Phillies/Cards series, including one in which he (or she) ran across home plate and distracted Phillies pitcher Roy Oswalt. The Cardinals ended up winning, and the rally squirrel's likeness has since shown up in the stadium on T-shirts, towels and homemade signs. Perhaps the squirrel had a hand in helping the Cardinals overpower the Brewers and their "beast mode," too.


While the World Series is on our mind, we're also starting to plan our Halloween costumes. Luckily, we can recycle from last year: Brian Wilson of the San Francisco Giants—the 2010 MLB champions—is still a hot Halloween costume choice.

Finally, although starting tonight all eyes will be on the Rangers and the Cardinals, neither team appears on the list of most-searched teams in 2011 so far. According to search data, fan favorites this year were the New York Yankees, the Boston Red Sox, the Philadelphia Phillies, the Chicago Cubs and the Atlanta Braves. The Yankees and Phillies went out in the first round of the playoffs, while the Braves and Sox both failed to claim hold of a wild card spot in waning days of the regular season.

With sunflower seeds in hand, we'll keep our eyes out over the next few days to see which of these two World Series teams will finally get their chance in the national—and search—spotlight. Having spent summers traveling up to Busch Stadium for games, I know who I'll be rooting for!


Posted by Kat Eller, Cardinals Fan (pictured on the right)

(Cross-posted on the Inside Search Blog)
URL: http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2011/10/its-beautiful-day-for-some.html

[G] Google’s Think Mobile Webinar featuring Avinash Kaushik - November 2nd

Posted: 20 Oct 2011 03:38 AM PDT

Official Google CPG Blog: Google's Think Mobile Webinar featuring Avinash Kaushik - November 2nd

Not sure how to most effectively leverage and measure your mobile marketing campaigns? Well, you're not alone. While mobile is an incredible new way to distribute content and reach customers on the go, it also presents a unique challenge when it comes to measuring the impact of our mobile efforts (like applications, advertisements or mobile-optimized websites).

Tune in on November 2nd for Google's Think Mobile webinar, Mobile Advertising: Right Person, Right Time, Right Message - Finally!, led by Avinash Kaushik, Digital Marketing Evangelist. Avinash will share tips and best practices for mobile marketing campaigns, new metrics unique to mobile, and how best to measure mobile ads and websites.
  • When: Wednesday, November 2, 2011 9-10:30am PST/ 12-1:30pm EST
  • How: Register here
URL: http://google-cpg.blogspot.com/2011/10/googles-think-mobile-webinar-featuring.html

[G] Mo-mentum: what’s new with mobile search advertising

Posted: 20 Oct 2011 03:38 AM PDT

Official Google Blog: Mo-mentum: what's new with mobile search advertising

Mobile search helps people find what they need in a snap. Whether they're choosing between two restaurants, shopping for a new watch, or buying a movie ticket, people make better decisions when they have access to more information. Search ads are information—answers—and on mobile devices, they're able to connect people and businesses in new, useful and relevant ways.

Today, we're unveiling new mobile search ad formats and some new details about the ways many different businesses are benefiting from mobile advertising.

Search ads, meet mobile apps
We're bringing the worlds of search and apps together with mobile advertising in a few ways:
  • Search ads in mobile apps: Lots of mobile apps give people the ability to search for information—like an app that lets you search for a restaurant nearby. Today we're announcing Custom Search Ads for these apps. These ads provide useful and relevant answers, for people searching within a mobile app. Custom Search Ads will also help app developers earn more money to fund their apps and grow their businesses on mobile.

    Custom Search Ads in mobile apps

  • Click to Download: Not surprisingly, many people use Google to search for information about mobile apps. This ad format helps consumers right when they're searching for information about an app, linking them directly to the App Store or Android Marketplace to download. We've recently enabled app developers to include app icons and information about the app in their ad unit so that people can make more informed decisions about whether they want to download the app.
  • Mobile App Extensions: This new, beta ad unit enables businesses to use mobile search ads to direct someone to a page within a mobile app already installed on their phone. For example, if someone searches for sneakers on a mobile device, they might see an ad that takes them directly into a cool shopping app they've installed on their phone.


Local search ads—so hot right now
Building local context into mobile ads makes them more useful both for both consumers and businesses. Here are a few specific examples:
  • Click to Call: We introduced these ads for high-end smartphones less than two years ago and they're now driving millions of calls per week to hundreds of thousands of businesses around the world. Click to call ads have been very effective in generating leads for businesses of all sizes, across many verticals—more people can call an Enterprise Rent-A-Car near them for rentals and more potential customers can connect with ADT Security for alarm system expertise, for example.
  • Hyperlocal search ads: Launched a year ago, these search ads contain useful local information like phone numbers, driving directions, a number to click and call a business directly, and also show people how far they are from specific business locations. Roy's Restaurants' efforts with this format led to a 40 percent increase in call volume—and lots more full tables!
  • Proximity as a factor in mobile search ads ranking: The distance between a person and an advertiser's business location is now a factor in mobile search ads ranking. This means an ad for a business with a physical location close to to a consumer may perform better in AdWords—driving more mobile traffic at a lower cost. The feature will be effective only when consumers opt in to share their device location for mobile searches. It will make our hyperlocal format more useful for businesses and users—advertisers can get started with this by creating Location Extensions for their mobile campaigns. Particularly this holiday season, when consumers are using their mobile phones to find a nearby store for last minute gift purchases, this new feature will help connect customers with storefronts.
  • Circulars: We began testing this new ad format with Best Buy and Macy's earlier this month. When someone clicks on a search or display ad (on desktop, mobile or tablet devices), they may see these engaging ads which contain photos of relevant products and special offers. With a few simple clicks, people who are at their desk can email that circular to their mobile phones, and later walk into their local store, flash their phone and redeem the offers.

Macy's Circular ads on mobile

The exciting thing for mobile users and businesses is that the possibilities for mobile search advertising are nearly endless. We're looking forward to helping businesses and consumers alike take advantage of this brave new (mobile) world.

Posted by Surojit Chatterjee, Senior Product Manager, Mobile Ads
URL: http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2011/10/mo-mentum-whats-new-with-mobile-search.html

[G] Introducing Flow Visualization: visualizing visitor flow

Posted: 19 Oct 2011 11:35 AM PDT

Google Analytics Blog: Introducing Flow Visualization: visualizing visitor flow

Many of you have shared with us difficulties you've experienced when using traditional path analysis tools. For instance, many of these tools don't sensibly group related visitor paths and pages, and segmentation analysis can be difficult. You're looking for better ways to visualize and quickly find those insights about how visitors flow through your sites.



The Google Analytics team has been listening and is working hard to meet your needs. Our design team chose not to build individual "path analysis," which can quickly become complicated. Instead, they took inspiration from a wide range of sources to reimagine approaches for visualizing visitor flow. Our goal is to help marketers and analysts better optimize their visitor experience by presenting the ways that visitors flow through their sites in an intuitive and useful way.



This morning at Web 2.0 Summit, Susan Wojcicki & I unveiled the release of "Flow Visualization" in Google Analytics, a tool that allows you to analyze site insights graphically, and instantly understand how visitors flow across pages on your site. Starting this week, "Visitors Flow" and "Goal Flow" will be rolling out to all accounts. Other types of visualizers will be coming to Google Analytics in the coming few months, but in the meantime, here's what you can expect from this initial release.



Visitors Flow



The Visitors Flow view provides a graphical representation of visitors' flow through the site by traffic source (or any other dimensions) so you can see their journey, as well as where they dropped off. You'll find this visualizer on the left hand navigation menu, where you'll see a new "Visitors Flow" link under the Visitors section.







Nodes are automatically clustered according to an intelligence algorithm that groups together the most likely visitor flow through a site.



You'll also notice that we made the visualization highly interactive. You can interact with the graph to highlight different pathways, and to see information about specific nodes and connections. For example, if you want to dive deeper into your "specials" set of pages, you can hover over the node to see more at a glance.







This type of visualization allows you to answer important questions, such as "How successful is my new promo page?" In the example above, a marketer instantly gains the insight that there are 5.46K visits (based on the sources on the left hand side) and the majority of visits to the "specials" or promo page come from Google search.



To take this a step further, you can drill down into any node by "exploring the traffic" through the node. In this case, you can see how visitors coming specifically from Google search journeyed across your site.







We realize that you might want to specifically focus on a node, so we're providing data on all the visits that lead to that node, and not just the ones that come from the top sources in the Visitors Flow. You can also traverse the path forwards or backwards on this visualizer to gain more insight on how engaged the users are to your new promotion.



Goal Flow



Goal Flow provides a graphical representation for how visitors flow through your goal steps and where they dropped off. Because the goal steps are defined by the site owner, they should reflect the important steps and page groups of interest to the site. In this first iteration, we're supporting only URL goals, but we'll soon be adding events and possibly other goal types.







You can find the Goal Flow visualizer in the Conversions > Goals section of the "Standard Reporting Tab." Goal Flow helps you understand:

  • The relative volume of visits to your site by the dimension you choose (e.g. traffic source, campaign, browser)

  • The rates at which visitors abandon different pathways

  • Where and how visitors navigate each of the steps that you defined

  • How the visitors interacted with your site, including backtracking to previous goal steps

You can also apply any advanced segments to a Flow Visualizer. In addition, for those who want to see how visitors arrive at a page (or pages) of interest, they can select that page (or pages) and visualize "backward". Such "reverse paths" could help site owners identify suboptimal placement of content. Similarly, "forward" paths from a page (or pages) can be visualized to understand most visited pages or to see visitor flow leakages that a site owner might be unaware of.







Pages before and after the node of interest are automatically grouped based on the most common "visitor" flows, and we're building continued improvements to help group together sensible visitor paths and page nodes.



If you don't have goals or goal funnels already set up, don't worry. You can create a new goal or goal funnel from your profile settings and check it out right away - it works backwards on your historical data.



These two views are our first step in tackling flow visualization for visitors through a site, and we look forward to hearing your feedback as all users begin experiencing it in the coming weeks. We're excited to bring useful and beautiful tools like these to help you understand your site, so stayed tuned for more!



As always, we welcome your input on how we can make Flow Visualization truly useful for you, so let us know in the comments, or send us your thoughts.



- Posted by Phil Mui, Google Analytics team


URL: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/blogspot/tRaA/~3/Pal1bIVCggE/introducing-flow-visualization.html

[G] What makes an ad worth spreading? TED to recognize 10 prime examples

Posted: 19 Oct 2011 11:35 AM PDT

YouTube Blog: What makes an ad worth spreading? TED to recognize 10 prime examples

Today we bring you a guest post from Ronda Carnegie, Head of Global Partnerships at TED, a nonprofit devoted to Ideas Worth Spreading from three worlds: Technology, Entertainment, Design. Carnegie explains how TED and YouTube are teaming up for the second year to present a challenge called 'Ads Worth Spreading.'



Last year, TED kicked off a challenge to the advertising industry called Ads Worth Spreading, our global search for innovation, ingenuity and intelligence in advertising. The winners can be seen on the front page of Show & Tell, YouTube's gallery of clever and effective creative marketing.



This year, we are delighted to announce that we're now accepting entries to TED's Ads Worth Spreading initiative through a channel on YouTube. The YouTube channel will help promote and showcase submissions, as well as spark conversation. Even if you're not an advertiser, you can visit the channel and comment on your favorite campaigns. Which ads are thought-provoking, funny, honest, warm, informative or creatively brilliant? We want your feedback, and the channel is our medium for hearing your voice.



One of the most common questions we're asked about Ads Worth Spreading is: "Why? Why does TED support an initiative around advertising?" TED's Curator Chris Anderson explains it this way -- "TED's mission is 'ideas worth spreading.' The dream behind this initiative is to find companies that want to communicate ideas to their consumers in the same way that TED wants to communicate with its audience. What makes ideas powerful is that they have a life of their own; an idea can reset someone's worldview and even begin a domino effect as they pass it on to friends."



TED will curate a final selection of ten campaigns from 2011. The results will be announced at the TED2012 conference in Long Beach, Calif. in March, and showcased on TED.com and YouTube.



If you're an agency, brand, producer or individual who's created an ad worth spreading this year, now is your chance to have your work recognized. Visit the Ads Worth Spreading channel and upload or add your YouTube video to the channel before December 31, 2011.



We're looking forward to finding 10 new winners to celebrate.



Ronda Carnegie, Head of Global Partnerships at TED, recently watched "Matt Cutts: Try something new for 30 days."


URL: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/youtube/PKJx/~3/MUhxFgK1LYY/what-makes-ad-worth-spreading-ted-to.html

[G] Policy webinars recap

Posted: 19 Oct 2011 11:35 AM PDT

Inside AdSense: Policy webinars recap


Based on your feedback from our previous blog posts, we've heard you'd like to learn more about our policies. Over the past few months, the AdSense Policy team has hosted webinars with publishers from across North America, Russia, Turkey, Poland, Italy, and France. In keeping with our monthly policy tips, we'd like to take this time to recap on our recent publisher events and to summarize our findings for you.



Policies are in place for the success of publishers and advertisers. One of the common pieces of feedback we hear from AdSense publishers who are just starting out is that there's a lot of information to read about the program. We understand that it can be challenging navigating our policies, and frustrating not being able to talk to a policy specialist directly. As a result, our policy team was available to answer your top questions during these recent webinars. In addition, the Policy team delivered a condensed overview of common policy violations to avoid and general best practices and tips to help maintain your account in good standing.



We went through a run-through of live demos and examples, which attendees told us were helpful. Many found that overall the sessions were helpful and that they gained a good understanding of our policies. Many publishers were unaware of the resources available to help you with policy notifications in our Help Center. We've posted your top policy questions and our answers on our Google Moderator page, which we encourage you to take a look at. If you'd like to listen to a recording of our presentation, please watch our YouTube video.



We'd like to thank all of you for your great feedback and questions. If you found the policy webinars valuable or have suggestions on which topics you'd like to hear about next, let us know by leaving a comment below. If you're interested in attending future events like these, make sure that you're opted in to 'Special Offers' in your email preferences within your AdSense account. We look forward to hosting more policy webinars in the future, and look for more policy updates from us by subscribing to the AdSense blog.



Posted by Cecelia Choi, AdSense Policy Specialist


URL: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/blogspot/tuAm/~3/vnb95t8mECs/policy-webinars-recap.html
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