Google Merchant Center Account introduced Multiple User Access feature!

Earlier this year, few business owners and consultants suggested in a Google Maps Help thread that Google should allow multiple Google accounts to gain access to a single business listing.

For years, this topic of allowing multiple accounts to manage a Google Place listing has been a hot and often requested feature.

There are many search agencies who handle local listings for their clients. These agencies would love to give access to their clients. In this way the client could make changes as well.

The good news is, this long requested feature is now available and those who heavily use and manage their product feeds within Google Merchant Center can now easily give others access to manage the feeds and data within the Google Merchant Center.

In the Google Merchant Center Help forums, Ronald from the Google Merchant Center help team wrote:

“As you may have already noticed, you now have an option of giving multiple users access to your Google Merchant Center account. Visit this help center article http://www.google.com/support/merchants/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=1637190 for more information.”

For detailed instructions on how this works, please click here.

Google +1 button gets two more key features!

Google released their +1 button for websites back in June, and since that time webmasters have eagerly been adopting the new social sharing button.

Despite a fairly low user response when compared to Twitter or Facebook, Google has seen adoption of the button on more than a million websites. Those sites get more than 4 billion total daily views.

Now that button is even more valuable. Google has added two key features: sharing on Google+ and “+snippets.”

It’s been expected for some time that Google would be integrating the +1 button with their social network.

Now we’re seeing exactly the form and function of that integration. Users who +1 a page will now see a “share” option when they hover over the +1 button. This allows them to share a link to the site, their commentary on it, and a snippet from the page with a few easy clicks.

Study: 71% of Online Americans now use Video-Sharing Sites!

Kathleen Moore of the Pew Internet Project has just written a report that says 71 percent of online Americans now use video-sharing sites such as YouTube and Vimeo, up from 33 percent 4.5 years ago. The use of video-sharing sites on any given day has also jumped, from 8 percent of online Americans in December 2006 to 28 percent in May 2011.

Pew also found that Internet users in rural areas are now just as likely as users urban and suburban areas to have used these sites, and online African-Americans and Hispanics are more likely than Internet-using whites to visit video-sharing sites. In addition, 81 percent of parents in the survey reported visiting video‐sharing sites, compared with 61 percent of the nonparents.

According to the latest statistics from YouTube, 48 hours of content are uploaded every minute to the site and the range of contributions is striking. YouTube lists 28 different categories for channels of video.

YouTube viewership has grown from 8 million views a day by the end of 2005, to over 3 billion views a day in 2011, according to the company’s data. And the company receives over 200 million views a day via mobile connections.

Adwords Editor upgraded to 9.5 !

Adwords Editor has been upgraded and the new version 9.5 provides support for Location Extensions, Campaign Experiments and many other features which can improve your productivity along with the management of your AdWords campaigns.

To distinguish this version with the earlier one, the improvements have been listed as:

• Campaign experiment settings
• Extended support for Location extensions support
• Background download
• Additional campaign settings
• Better Destination URL links
• IP addresses and non-ASCII characters in URLs
• Unlimited number of search conditions
• Additional image ad dimensions
• Revert warnings
• Streamline Add/Update Multiple
• Item status and disapprovals
• Updated first page bid estimates
• Service announcements

The top three changes count for major changes, while the other changes have a minor, but significant effect.

Google states that the improvements made were on the basis of the user feedback. It even assured that your next log in to your AdWords Editor account will get a prompt to get their version updated.

In Gmail: Adwords goes graphic!

Google Adwords has seen many developments lately: from the adwords video to adwords express.

If you check your Google mail account you see adwords ads in gmail on top of the menu bar and on the right hand side of your opened message. Up until very recently, those ads were only text based. Well this has now changed. Adwords has now gone graphic in Gmail.

The new AdWords image format appearing above the text ads in the right sidebar includes:

• an image,
• a headline
• lines of text,
• next to an envelope icon, the advertiser’s name
• Clicking the ad will take the user to an e-mail message.

A Google spokesperson said, “The ads are designed specifically for Gmail and look and function a little differently from regular text ads and the ads are being shown to “a small number” of users in the U.S. and testing began in July.”

We are yet to be informed on:

• which advertisers are testing this new feature – we read that Groupon is part of the test group -
• how do advertisers pay for these ads
• how these ads are targeted

It will surely increase adwords click through rate (CTR) in Gmail.

Google revamping their Adwords Keyword tool!

According to the folks at Hobo SEO in the UK:

They have been doing Keyword research solid for the last 4 weeks and last week for a short time Google Keyword Tool let them EXPORT more than 800 keywords at a time. It let them do it just once.

It might be the case that Google is going to give us a much more useful keyword tool in the near future.

A Google spokesperson confirmed that the change is coming, but wouldn’t commit to a release date.

With the change the AdWords Keyword Tool will allow marketers to input 2500 keywords up from just 100 to generate new keyword ideas.

However, Google isn’t finished with the enhancement yet, and, currently, the tool still only uses the first 100 words to generate results.

Google Adwords: Conversion tracking for mobile devices!

If you happen to be displaying your AdWords ads on mobile devices, you may have noticed that AdWords conversion tracking is even more hit and miss on some mobile devices.

There are compatibility issues with JavaScript on some devices. AdWords conversion tracking is primarily setup for JavaScript which might cause the problem.  

Google appear to be slowly introducing a new option in the conversion tracking configuration that seems to solve this problem. The new option is called "Page markup language".

Here is how Google describe the new option:

"If you are advertising to mobile devices, you may want to choose a mobile markup language. JavaScript variables aren't compatible with conversion tracking for mobile devices.

html - Can be used in most cases when dealing with html or xhtml. This allows dynamic revenue value based upon JavaScript variable names.

chtml - Can be used for mobile sites implemented in chtml.

mobile xhtml - Can be used for sites implemented in xhtml that target mobile browsers. It requires less browser features than the normal html snippet.

wml- Can be used for mobile sites implemented in wml."

In Mobile adwords, all phone numbers will become clickable!

One of the easiest ways to receive a quick answer on the go is by clicking on a number from your phone and calling a business directly.

Google has long supported phone extensions, which allow advertisers to include clickable phone numbers in AdWords when they appear on mobile devices.

Now on Monday, in a blog post Google announced that phone numbers in other parts of the ad creative will be clickable, as well, essentially creating phone extensions from ads that don’t necessarily have them activated.

Now advertisers can view detailed reporting on click-to-call activity by segmenting traffic by click type. As a result, Google will be making an upcoming change to ads where any phone number in an ad will be clickable on a mobile device.  

Clicks on a phone number in an ad will be charged at the same rate as a click to the web site.

The change will be rolling out over time.

Google Adwords: Topic Targeting!

Google Display Ads have been the subject of a lot of Google marketing and advertising attention recently, and of course there is a lot of opportunity on the content network in many verticals.

So when Google rolls out a new display network control like topic targeting as they did in March, it’s worth taking some time to better understand how the feature works and when it mkes sense to utilize it.

Google in a blog post said:

Using topics to contextually target your ads offers broad targeting and reach and is a good way to connect with a large audience quickly and easily to generate awareness or drive sales. When using topic targeting, our system looks at all the terms on a page to determine the topic of the page and is less reliant on particular keywords. On the other hand, using keywords to contextually target allows you to target your ads to a more specific set of pages in the Display Network, since you use individual keywords to develop a theme in your ad groups. However, both targeting options can be used together to effectively reach an audience across the Google Display Network.

The general idea here is that topic targeting is taking a similar but less granular approach to targeting than keyword targeting.

It’s basically all or nothing – you can target pages whose topics are similar to your topic or not. Meanwhile with keyword targeting we could break out several groups with highly granular keyword groupings to speak to things like specific modifiers, brands, or styles. In fact, in thinking through content network organization, this has, historically, been Google’s advice on campaign structure:

Paid search without keywords: Adwords Express for small Business!

Google Express is the next step in a natural progression by Google to try to simplify AdWords for smaller advertisers:

Rather than saying you’ll pay X for a click or you’ll pay Y for a conversion, just tell Google what you have to spend every month and they’ll figure out the rest. Paid search without keywords for small businesses is finally here!

The general idea is that you set up an incredibly simple campaign that includes nothing but:

• Your category

• Your ad headline

• Your ad description

• Where to send people (send them to your site, or better yet: send them to Google’s site!)

• A maximum monthly budget (don’t worry: Google will even give you a highlighted recommendation if you’re unsure. It’s in green, so you know it’s the good one.)

Here’s how this looks as you walk through the sign in: