AdWords Call Metrics

What It Is:

AdWords call metrics is a new feature that lets you measure the number of phone calls generated by your AdWords campaigns. Using the technology behind Google Voice, call metrics creates a unique phone number for each of your campaigns which is automatically inserted into your ad when it appears on Google.com, on both desktop computers & high-end mobile devices.

When a potential customer calls the number in your ad, AdWords notes that the call took place. Then, when you view your AdWords reports, you'll see the number of calls you received and other metrics, including call duration.

Why You'd Use It:



With insight into how many calls your ads are generating, you’ll get a better understanding of the value that AdWords is bringing to your business. At the same time, featuring a phone number in your ad will give your potential customers another way to reach you.

Availability

Call metrics is currently available to a limited number of advertisers. If call metrics is available in your account, you'll find this option in the 'Phone extensions' section of your 'Ad extensions' tab.

If call metrics is not available in your account and you'd like to use this feature, please sign up here. We plan to make call metrics available to more advertisers in the coming months and will let you know when it's available in your account.


Source: http://www.google.com/ads/innovations/callmetrics.html

Measure the phone calls you get from AdWords

What if you found out that your AdWords campaigns were bringing you more customers than you realized?

Zac Stafford, Senior Search Strategist at Nina Hale Search Marketing in Minneapolis, MN, recently discovered that this was true for his client, modern furniture retailer Room & Board. Stafford saw some encouraging results as an early beta tester of AdWords call metrics, a new feature that automatically includes a unique phone number in your ads to measure the calls that you receive from AdWords.

“By cross-checking our call metrics reports with our sales records, we saw that half the people who called the toll free number in our ad purchased online but the other half purchased in a store. Before using call metrics, we determined our ROI just by looking at the online sales numbers. Now we have proof that online search ad campaigns drive in-store purchases.”

Today we're announcing that AdWords call metrics is available for more advertisers, making it easier than ever to measure the phone calls that AdWords generates for your business. Using the technology behind Google Voice, call metrics assigns your campaign a unique phone number which is automatically inserted into your ad on both desktop and high-end mobile devices, where the number is clickable.



When a user calls the number in your ad, the call is automatically routed to your business, and AdWords notes that this call took place. Then, when you look at your AdWords reports, you’ll see the number of calls generated by each campaign, call duration, and in the near future, caller area code. You'll still only pay for clicks on your ads, but we intend to charge for call metrics in the future.

Once you know where your calls are coming from, you can refine your marketing strategy to make sure you’re getting the most out of your ads. For example, you could test different ad text variations to see which results in the most calls or reallocate budget to campaigns that truly bring you the highest ROI.

Currently, call metrics is only available to a limited number of US advertisers. We plan to make the feature available to more advertisers in the coming months. To find out if call metrics is available in your account and to learn more about the feature, visit Google Ad Innovations.

Source: http://adwords.blogspot.com

Search Engine Optimization for Bing

When I attended both SMX Advanced in Seattle back in June and SES San Jose just a couple of weeks ago, I heard a lot of questions from webmasters about Bing, especially pertaining to search engine optimization issues. Typically these included:

* I want to do SEO for Bing—where should I start?
* How is Bing different in terms of SEO?
* What do webmasters need to know and do?
* Are there any insider tips for successful ranking?

I’ll tackle these questions by providing some useful, baseline information and include pointers to more detailed, pertinent docs.

As you know, Bing is an evolution in the search engine space. With its innovative, new user interface (UI) design bringing new depth and opportunities for searchers, they can now quickly find the information they seek when they search the Internet. New UI features, such as Quick Tabs, Related Searches, and Document Preview (to name just a few), surface more information and present more opportunities to discover what searchers want to know so they can make more informed decisions more quickly. As a result, we describe Bing as a decision engine. (For more information on the new UI features in Bing, see the Bing Webmaster Center blog post, Bing white paper for webmasters & publishers released.)

Under the covers of the new UI, we do a lot of engineering work on a very large scale. For example, we crawl a variety of content types found on the Web, index that content, apply appropriate algorithms, and finally send relevant content to user queries in our search engine results pages (SERPs).

Bing’s SEO principles

SEO is fundamentally about creating websites that are good for people. The most basic advice we can give for achieving optimum rank for your site in Bing is to do the following:

* Develop great, original content (including well-implemented keywords) directed toward your intended audience
* Use well-architected code in your webpages (including images and Sitemaps) so that users’ web browsers and search engine crawlers can read the content you want indexed)
* Earn several, high-quality, authoritative inbound links

As you can see by the links, much of this material has already been discussed in-depth in the Webmaster Center team blog in our ongoing column, search engine marketing (SEM) 101.

The type of SEO work and tasks webmasters need to perform to be successful in Bing hasn’t changed—all of the legitimate, time-tested, SEO skills and knowledge that webmasters have invested in previously apply fully today with Bing. Moreover, investments in solid, reputable SEO work made for Bing will bring similar improvements in your website’s page rank in other search engines as well.

Ultimately, SEO is still SEO. Bing doesn’t change that. Bing’s new user interface design simply adds new opportunities to searchers to find what the information they want more quickly and easily, and that benefits webmasters who have taken the time to work on the quality of their content, website architecture, and have done the hard work of earning several high-quality inbound links.

Key content and tools for performing SEO with Bing

To keep up with the latest and greatest information coming from the Bing Webmaster Center team, we recommend that you follow and review the following content:

* Review the Bing official guidelines for successful indexing document for various recommendations on technical and content issues as well as known problems that can affect your site’s rank
* Visit the Webmaster Center blog to keep up with the latest information from the team (you can even subscribe to our blog’s RSS feed to automate this process)
* Register all of your websites with Bing Webmaster Center tools, where you can use our tools to see all sorts of data to your website pertinent to webmasters
* Participate in our Webmaster Center user forums to ask questions and provide us with feedback

We look forward to working with you as partners in helping our mutual customers find the information they seek on the Internet.

-- Rajesh Srivastava, Principal Group Program Manager, Bing


Source Bing.com

What Happens to My YSM Account Balance?

The answer depends on how you transitioned your account

A common question from advertisers during the transition process from Yahoo! Search Marketing to adCenter has been, “What happens to my YSM account balance?” Not surprising, since everyone (including small businesses) is watching their dollars closely these days.

The answer to this question depends on how (or if) you transitioned your account, and your status as an advertiser. Your account should fall into one of the following three scenarios:

1. I transitioned my Yahoo! Search Marketing account to adCenter using the process in the Yahoo! user interface.

You do not have to take any action. Any remaining balance in your Yahoo! Search Marketing will automatically be handled in one of the following ways, depending upon the balance amount:

* If your balance was greater than $25 at the time that the ad serving transition completed and your account was put into a read-only state, we will automatically transfer your balance to your adCenter account. This is expected to occur by the middle of November 2010. You will receive notification via email when this is completed. If for any reason your balance cannot be automatically
transferred, it will be processed as a refund in early 2011 (see details below).

* If your balance was $25 or less at the time that the ad serving transition completed and your account was put into a read-only state, your remaining balance will be automatically refunded to you. Refunds will be processed shortly after the transition tool in your Yahoo! Search Marketing account is shut down, which is currently scheduled for early 2011.


2. I have not, or will not, transition my Yahoo! Search Marketing account to adCenter.

You do not have to take any action. Any remaining balance that was in your Yahoo! Search Marketing account when the ad serving transition was completed and your account was put into a read-only state will be automatically refunded to you. Refunds will be processed shortly after the transition tool in your Yahoo! Search Marketing account is shut down, which is currently scheduled for early 2011.

Note: If you haven’t yet transitioned but decide to do so later on, any balance of more than $25 will be automatically transferred to your adCenter account in early 2011. Balances of $25 or less will be refunded shortly after the transition tool in your Yahoo! Search Marketing account is shut down, which is currently scheduled for early 2011.

3. I am a managed advertiser who chose “Keep my adCenter account” as my transition option.


The answer here is the same as #2 above: You do not have to take any action. Any remaining balance that was in your Yahoo! Search Marketing account when the ad serving transition was completed and your account was put into a read-only state will be automatically refunded to you. Refunds will be processed shortly after the transition tool in your Yahoo! Search Marketing account is shut down, which is currently scheduled for early 2011.

To summarize, in all situations, you do not have to request your account balance be refunded—it will be returned to you either in your adCenter account this month, or as a refund in early 2011.

Yahoo blog — November 4th, 2010 01:58 PM The Team

Alternative search engine Blekko launches

Blekko's alternative search engine -- a $24 million venture-backed project that's been three years in the making -- is today launching its public beta.

With the official rollout, Blekko is also releasing several new features designed for both mainstream and the site's super users.

As you may recall, Blekko is designed to eliminate spam search results, allowing users to search just a subset of the web through its proprietary slashtag technology.

The most significant upgrade to Blekko's search engine is the addition of slashtags that auto-fire for queries that fall into one seven categories: health, colleges, autos, personal finance, lyrics, recipes and hotels.

Every time a Blekko user's query is determined to be in one of these categories, Blekko will automatically append the associated slashtag to the query and limit results to just the subset of URLs that fall under that slashtag.

The auto-fire functionality is designed with passive searchers in mind, and aims to eliminate friction for first time users. The technology that powers these auto-slashtags was developed through an extensive research and development phase that involved analyzing the relationship between queries and the type of spam results they typically generate.

Blekko plans to introduce auto-slashing for additional categories moving forward, but selected to launch with ones that represent a high volume of search traffic and are typically laden with spammy results.

Health, lyric and financial queries on Google or Bing, for instance, will return results dominated by poor quality content farms or malware-hosting sites.

Those same searches on Blekko yield results only from high quality sites.

Blekko's slashtag formula works because of passionate users who take the time to add and edit URLs for category slashtags. As such, the company has released new features to enable users to apply to be editors for slashtags as well as share their comments and feedback on individual slashtags.

Think of this as the Wikipedia formula but applied to search, so a small percentage of users will work together to build out slashtags for the majority of Blekko searchers.

Blekko has been testing its solution to search with roughly 8,000 beta testers who have created more than 3,000 different slashtags. Blekko tells us that 11 percent of its existing user base come back to the site on a weekly basis.

CEO Rich Skrenta and founder Mike Markson have modest projections for the immediate future, but believe that once the site hits one to two million queries per day, it can be profitable.

Blekko is currently available on the web or as a mobile-optimized site, but mobile applications are also said to be in the works

Source: CNN.com