February 28th, 2011 | by Vivek Tata | published in Google Merchant
Now that you’ve settled into 2011, you’re probably thinking about what you need to do to make it a great year. To help get you started, we’d like to offer two suggestions to improve your Google Product Search experience:
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Include “rel=canonical” tags on your website. Many merchants have several identical product pages for each item. With the rel=”canonical” tag, your webmaster can indicate which URL you’d like to include on Google.com. This tag is necessary for participation in Rich Snippets, and also allows you to provide clean, user-friendly URLs that don’t include excess tracking or category navigation parameters. You can read more about the “rel=canonical” tag in a previous blog post.
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Update your technical contact in the Google Merchant Center. If you’ve ever wondered why your feed didn’t process, then you should ensure that your contact information is up-to-date in the Google Merchant Center’s Settings page. We’ll send an email to this address if there are technical issues with your account, such as problems with the content you submitted. We may also send you helpful suggestions on topics like data quality.
Posted by Natasha Prats, Partner Manager, Google Product Search
February 28th, 2011 | by Pamela Eng | published in Google DoubleClick
A new year often means new resolutions, a time to recover from the excesses of the holiday season and plan for the new year. As reflected in January’s Ad Planner 1000, anyway, it seems that less shopping, tax season and travel are particularly top of…
February 28th, 2011 | by Picasa Team | published in Google Photos (Picasa)
Posted by Ping Chen, Software engineer
Over the past few days, we’ve been testing a new Picasa Web Albums layout that does a better job of of updating you with new and inspiring photos. Based on the positive response we’ve received, we’re now rolling out this new homepage for everyone.
This new design centers around photos that are interesting to you. We wanted to give you faster access to the newest photos from your family and friends along with some great photos from the talented Picasa community.
When you log in to Picasa Web Albums, you will not only see your own albums, but albums that have been shared with you, the latest public albums from people you follow, and featured photos from the Picasa community right on your home page.
Go to picasaweb.google.com now to begin exploring your new homepage.
February 25th, 2011 | by A Googler | published in Google Voice
We’re often inspired by the creative and interesting ways that individuals and organizations use Google Voice, so we thought it was time to start sharing some of their stories. In the first of what we hope to be an ongoing series of interviews, we ch…
February 24th, 2011 | by Carlos | published in Google Maps
[Cross posted from Google Lat/Long Blog]
During the crisis in Egypt, third-party Geo developers helped the international community understand the situation and keep persons affected by the crisis safe through the use of innovative new tools. These s…
February 24th, 2011 | by miriam | published in Google Student Blog
We are looking forward to celebrating women’s achievements and driving awareness of women’s issues in honor of the 100th anniversary of International Women’s Day on March 8, 2011.
This year Google is collaborating with Women for Women Internationa…
February 24th, 2011 | by Google Grants Team Member | published in Google Grants
Cross posted on The Official Google Checkout Blog
We’re thrilled to announce that as part of the Google Checkout for Non-Profits program, free transaction processing for Google Grants recipients will be extended through 2011.
So if you’re part of the Google Grants program and you have a Google Checkout account, you’ll be able to use Google Checkout to accept donations without paying transaction processing fees in the coming year. We hope many non-profits take advantage of this benefit through the next year as they raise funds to advance their causes.
For more information about other Google tools for non-profits, check out the Google for Non-Profits website.
Posted by Satyajeet Salgar, Checkout Team
February 23rd, 2011 | by Fred Sauer, Developer Advocate | published in Google App Engine
If you’ve been watching Best Buy closely, you already know that Best Buy is constantly trying to come up with new and creative ways to use App Engine to engage with their customers. In this guest blog post, Luke Francl, BBYOpen Developer, was kind enou…
February 23rd, 2011 | by Sally Cole | published in Google DoubleClick
The ability to buy and sell impressions in real-time is a major enabling feature of the fundamental changes powering the display marketplace today. Impressions are coming up for sale as they occur in real-time. Savvy buyers are evaluating these impress…
February 23rd, 2011 | by Picasa Team | published in Google Photos (Picasa)
Posted by Shuangfeng Li, Software Engineer
We’ve made sharing and storing your images in Picasa Web Albums even easier by improving the image upload process. Now you’ll find a smoother upload flow, the five-at-a-time limitation has been removed, and you can upload HD video, too.
To get started from Chrome, Firefox or Safari click the Upload button, select an album and then choose the images and videos you want to upload. After your images have uploaded, you will see large thumbnails where you can easily add a caption, zoom in or delete right from the upload screen.
If you use Internet Explorer, you can continue to use the basic uploader or use the plug-in for drag-and-drop bulk uploading.
Another easy way to upload to Picasa Web Albums is from Gallery on an Android device. For example, with Android 3.0, Honeycomb, you can capture an image or video with your tablet’s camera and upload directly to Picasa Web Albums to share with friends.
We’re always working to improve Picasa Web Albums, please share your feedback in our forum. Happy uploading!
February 22nd, 2011 | by Unknown | published in Google TV Ads Blog
Founded in 1985, SelectQuote.com pioneered an impartial, pressure-free way to shop for term life insurance from competing insurance companies. The company has long since utilized television to drive awareness and inbound queries but in 2008, it added Google TV Ads to its media mix to enhance those efforts.
“Right out of the gate, we saw positive results — lots of incremental calls and efficient media costs,” says Kim Terrill, director of broadcast media for SelectQuote.com. However, Kim admits that tracking had become challenging with over 25 unique phone numbers mapping to various ads. SelectQuote decided to simplify and use just one phone number even though that meant not being able to track which networks were bringing in which calls.
Around this time, Google TV Ads began experimenting with its call attribution feature which automates the analysis and attribution of incoming customer calls and produces reports detailing call metrics for each spot aired. Using Google technology, the feature analyzes and understands which ad drove which calls, even if multiple ads drive viewers to the same phone number. After SelectQuote’s call logs were uploaded into the system, Google matched incoming calls with aired spots based on date, time, historical call volumes and a host of other factors. “We started to see trends and were able to identify the targets that brought in the highest and lowest cost-per-lead (CPL) on a consistent basis, Kim notes. “I could adjust my budgets and bids at anytime based on this data to easily manage to a desirable CPL.”
SelectQuote’s CPL decreased by 35% after four weeks of optimizing campaigns using Google TV Ads’ call attribution feature compared to the four week period prior. As Kim puts it, “what is truly astonishing is that we are using Google’s smart technologies to directly and easily improve what we’re doing.”
Learn more about SelectQuote’s success by reading the entire case study here. If your business could benefit from powerful call attribution metrics, create a Google TV Ads campaign to access this and other features cost-free.
Posted by Neha Mandal, Product Marketing Manager for Google TV Ads
February 22nd, 2011 | by Alberto Savoia | published in Google Testing
Note: This post is rated PG-13 for use of a mild expletive. If you are likely to be offended by the repeated use a word commonly heard in elementary school playgrounds, please don’t read any further.CRAP is short for Change Risk Anti-Patterns – a …
February 22nd, 2011 | by James Whittaker | published in Google Testing
By James WhittakerThese posts have garnered a number of interesting comments. I want to address two of the negative ones in this post. Both are of the same general opinion that I am abandoning testers and that Google is not a nice place to ply this tra…
February 22nd, 2011 | by Pamela Eng | published in Google DoubleClick
(originally posted on the DoubleClick Search Blog)In the blog post from January 18, we mentioned that we’ve been working on an updated version of DoubleClick Search, called V3. We’ll soon be introducing some of the features from V3 to the current v…
February 22nd, 2011 | by Google Grants Team Member | published in Google Grants
Last year we conducted our Annual Survey, which collected responses from our grantee base on a range of topics like AdWords usage, performance, marketing strategy, product adoption, organization needs and case study information.
In an effort to better understand the needs and trends of organizations within our grantee base, we also asked for NTEE codes from US grantee respondents so that we could begin to associate these needs and trends with sub-categories of the NGO industry and offer some insight into the NGO industry in which your organization works.
We’re excited to be able to now share this insight with you in the form of industry benchmarks.
Over the next few months we’ll feature a series of posts that offer benchmark data for each of the NTEE categories represented within our grantee base. The benchmarks are an aggregated and averaged interpretation of the NGO categories that were well represented in the survey results. We won’t provide benchmark data for those categories that were under represented or didn’t have any results.
You can look forward to industry information like types of tracking metrics, mission objectives, marketing objectives, AdWords performance and agency usage.
We’ll begin our series with the Arts, Culture & Humanities category and continue in batches until we’ve shared benchmarks for all represented industries.
Add our blog feed to your reader to see when your industry benchmark is posted.
Posted by Jessica Vaughan, Google Grants Team