Saturday, October 22, 2011

Googland

Googland

[G] This week's Trends: breaking news, music videos, and corn

Posted: 21 Oct 2011 04:52 PM PDT

YouTube Blog: This week's Trends: breaking news, music videos, and corn

Each weekday, we at YouTube Trends take a look at the most interesting videos and cultural phenomena on YouTube as they develop. We want take a moment to highlight some of what we've come across this week:

  • We discovered a viral video trending amongst the 55+ crowd.



  • We saw a stadium stunt that spread from Iowa in popularity.



  • We looked at some of the trends around the big Col. Gadhafi news out of Libya.



  • We studied how two major music videos were gaining popularity around the planet.



  • We checked out a viral political spot from North Africa.



  • We tracked last weekend's "Occupy" protest footage from different parts of the U.S. and the world.



  • And we experienced what it would be like to kayak with blue whales:







Check back every day for the latest about what's trending on YouTube at: www.YouTube.com/Trends



Kevin Allocca, YouTube Trends Manager, recently watched "Bobby Brown - Every Little Step."


URL: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/youtube/PKJx/~3/Da-7sY6QA1g/this-weeks-trends-breaking-news-music.html

[G] Celebrating VisiCalc's 32nd birthday with the inventors of the spreadsheet

Posted: 21 Oct 2011 04:52 PM PDT

Docs Blog: Celebrating VisiCalc's 32nd birthday with the inventors of the spreadsheet

On Wednesday, VisiCalc, the first spreadsheet available for personal computers, turned 32. We invited its inventors, Dan Bricklin and Bob Frankston, to Hangout On Air with us to celebrate a product that's paved the way for much of what the Google Docs team has been able to do today.

Users around the world tuned in to our live public stream as Dan and Bob shared the history of VisiCalc, their thoughts the spreadsheets of today, and their visions for the future. Watch the full video below.



And for you spreadsheets fanatics out there -- you can download and run a working copy of the original IBM PC VisiCalc spreadsheet program from 1981 at Dan Bricklin's site.

Posted by: Teresa Wu, Community Manager
URL: http://googledocs.blogspot.com/2011/10/celebrating-visicalcs-32nd-birthday.html

[G] Tunisia Talks on YouTube

Posted: 21 Oct 2011 10:58 AM PDT

Official Google Blog: Tunisia Talks on YouTube

The Arab Spring started in Tunisia, and it's appropriate that Tunisia is now leading the way to a full democracy with their landmark free elections scheduled to take place on October 23. To help in this process, we recently partnered with startup news portal Tunisia Live to offer a training workshop in Tunis on Google tools and social media for politicians.

The turnout was fantastic; members from more than 40 parties and independent coalitions attended. The same day, Tunisia Live launched the Tunisia Talks channel on YouTube, channeling the enthusiasm of politicians to leverage social media and engage with voters. In this project, Tunisians are encouraged to submit and vote for top questions to the candidates, and many did so—for a flavor, see this example or this one. So far, more than 400 questions have been submitted.



This outreach is all the more exciting because YouTube was blocked for so many years in Tunisia. But when the regime collapsed last January, the site was unbanned and quickly became popular. Many Tunisian media outlets have set up channels to organize their video libraries on YouTube.

In this weekend's elections, Tunisians will choose a constitutional council to write a new constitution for the country. Voters will select from lists of party members and independents. The Tunisian electoral committee has set up an official site www.isie.tn and is actively using social media to encourage voter registration—check their channel YouTube.com/isietn.

This is an exciting time in Tunisia. The media landscape—once limited and government-controlled—is now opening up to online platforms. Tunisians finally have access to a free Internet—and it's playing a key role in building an encompassing political environment.

Posted by Samir ElBahaie, Regional Policy and Government Affairs Manager, Middle East and Northern Africa
URL: http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2011/10/tunisia-talks-on-youtube.html

[G] Making local online advertising easy with Google AdWords Express

Posted: 21 Oct 2011 10:58 AM PDT

Inside AdWords: Making local online advertising easy with Google AdWords Express

Today, we're officially introducing AdWords Express in the UK and Germany. AdWords Express is a faster and simpler way to start advertising online in under five minutes and is designed to help local businesses that aren't already AdWords advertisers create effective campaigns. Watch the video below to see how you can create and run an online campaign from start to finish in just a few clicks:


AdWords Express helps potential customers find your website or Place page and gives you a quick and straightforward way to connect with them and grow your business. You simply provide some basic business information, choose some wording for your text ad, select a monthly budget and your campaign is ready to go.


After you sign up, the campaign will be automatically managed for you. AdWords Express will figure out which searches should trigger your ad to appear and displays it when these searches happen. Your ad will be shown in the Ads section of search results pages—on the top or right hand side—and in Google Maps with a distinctive blue pin. Customers can see your ad whether they're searching on laptops or mobile phones.


As with all our ad products, you pay only when a customer clicks on your ad. To make things even easier, AdWords Express optimizes your ads to get the most out of your advertising campaign and budget.

Many businesses are already finding success through AdWords, but we know many of you are looking for an easier way to begin advertising online. Visit www.google.co.uk/adwords/express to sign up or learn more about how it works.

Posted by Kiley McEvoy, Product Manager, AdWords Express
URL: http://adwords.blogspot.com/2011/10/making-local-online-advertising-easy.html

[G] Introducing Dynamic Search Ads (beta)

Posted: 21 Oct 2011 10:58 AM PDT

Inside AdWords: Introducing Dynamic Search Ads (beta)

For many online businesses, each day you might have hundreds of new listings, items that temporarily change availability, or items that are permanently removed from stock. And at the same time, user search behavior can be a moving target -- each day, 16% of searches that occur, Google has never seen before. So even well-managed AdWords campaigns containing thousands of keywords can miss relevant searches, experience delays getting ads written for new products, or get out of sync with what's actually available on your web site. That's not great for advertisers. It's also not great for end users, who appreciate relevant ads linked to landing pages with in-stock items that perfectly match what they're searching for.

To help with these challenges, we're launching Dynamic Search Ads, a new way to target relevant searches with dynamic ads generated right from your website. Dynamic Search Ads complement your existing keyword-targeted ads to help you sell more with less effort.

Dynamic Targeting, Ads and Landing Pages

 With Dynamic Search Ads, we maintain a fresh index of your inventory using Google's organic web crawling technology.



When a relevant search occurs, we dynamically generate an ad with a headline based on the query, and the text based on your most relevant landing page.




The ad enters the auction and competes normally -- but we'll hold it back for any search where you also have an eligible keyword-targeted ad. So you get additive results from broader exposure for more of your in-stock inventory, without disrupting your existing keyword campaigns.

User Experience & Performance

Ads are answers. And when users see ads and landing pages that deliver exactly what they're searching for, they're more likely to click and convert. So it's not surprising that we've seen solid performance in limited testing so far. While results vary, the majority of advertisers in our pilot have seen 5-10% increase in clicks and conversions with satisfactory ROI.

Some advertisers have the potential for better results. ApartmentHomeLiving.com, a leading U.S. apartment shopping website, is one example. Lawrence Cotter, General Manager, manages their huge online inventory of apartment listings that's constantly changing and growing. Over the past 5 years, his AdWords campaigns have topped 15 million keywords. Several weeks after implementing Dynamic Search Ads, he reported:
"Using Dynamic Search Ads increased conversions by almost 50% with an average cost-per-conversion that's 73% less than our traditional search ads. Dynamic Search Ads are doing a really good job finding the right searches to tap into, creating good ads, and getting visitors to the most relevant page on our site."  
You're In Control

You can choose to target your whole site, specific categories of products on your site, pages containing certain words, or pages containing certain strings in your URL. And all controls can be used as negatives, along with traditional keyword negatives, to refine your targeting and prevent the promotion of out-of-stock items.

Reporting and optimization work in familiar fashion. You get full reporting on searches that generated clicks, destination pages that matched ads, ad headlines that were generated, as well as average CPC, clicks, and conversions. Many popular third party tracking systems are also supported. To optimize, use familiar techniques like adjusting your max CPC bid and negatives.

Availability & More Details

At this time, Dynamic Search Ads are available in all countries and languages as a limited beta. You can join the interest list by contacting your Google account representative or signing up here. To learn more, please visit our Help Center FAQs.

Posted by Baris Gultekin, Director, AdWords Product Management
URL: http://adwords.blogspot.com/2011/10/introducing-dynamic-search-ads-beta.html

[G] Think Mobile Webinar - November 2nd

Posted: 21 Oct 2011 10:58 AM PDT

Inside AdWords: Think Mobile Webinar - 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 (which may include applications, advertisements and/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

Posted by Andrew Truong, Inside AdWords crew
URL: http://adwords.blogspot.com/2011/10/think-mobile-webinar-november-2nd.html
Posted by at

No comments:

Post a Comment

Subscribe to: Post Comments (Atom)