Google Play revenue growing much faster than Apple Inc!

Google's app store revenues are growing much faster than those of Apple Inc.

App Annie, an analytics firm, showed Google's app store revenues were 38.5 percent of Apple's, a big gain from a year ago when it was worth just a tenth of Apple's, as its free Android mobile operating system helped it win nearly 70 percent of the global mobile market.

Fuelled by roaring growth of Android mobile devices, largely manufactured by Samsung Electronics and up-and-coming rivals, Google Play revenues jumped 90 percent in the first quarter from the fourth quarter, according to App Annie.

It’s the App World!

“Four out of five minutes” spent on mobile devices are spent with apps (per comScore). And roughly 80 percent of mobile time is with apps rather than the browser.

Recently Flurry Analytics published findings based on five years of smartphone traffic data. Flurry said that 80 percent of mobile consumer time is on apps. And Facebook is the single dominant mobile app.

Quoting Flurry Analytics,” Five years into its existence, the app economy is thriving, with The Wall Street Journal recently estimating annual revenue of $25 billion. Once again, we have to appreciate that this economy did not exist until 2008. As we looked for possible signs of slowing, we could not find any, largely due to the fast adoption of tablets just after smartphones.”

Nixle are now integrated into Google's Public Alerts platform!

To help keep the public safe and informed during community-wide emergencies, local police and fire alerts from Nixle are now integrated into Google's Public Alerts platform, a service that delivers relevant emergency information across Google Search, Google Maps, and Google Now.

This partnership will provide the public with accurate safety information when and where it matters most, helping to increase communications between local authorities and their residents.

Police, fire, and emergency management agency alerts will now appear when a Google search or a Google Maps search is performed in an area with an active emergency alert in effect.

Mobile devices will drive a third of US paid clicks by December 2013!

A report released by Marin Software titled “The State of Mobile Search Advertising in the World,” the 2012 data are drawn from search campaigns conducted in 13 geographies including the US, UK, China, Europe and Australia.

Marin forecasts in the report are that, mobile devices (smartphones, tablets) will drive a third of US paid clicks by December 2013. The company says that as of December 2012, mobile devices accounted for 23.4 percent of all US paid-search clicks. Mobile also captured 18.4 percent of search budgets in December.

Google search for health related information sky rocking!

According to a new study from the Pew Research Center’s Internet & American Life Project, 72 percent of U.S. internet users have gone online in the past year specifically for health-related information, and 77 percent of that group say their research started at Google, Bing or another general search engine.

That’s significantly more than the 13 percent that begin at health portals like WebMD, general information sites like Wikipedia (only two percent) and social networks (one percent).

The Pew research surveyed 3,014 U.S. adults between August 7 and September 6, 2012.

 

Google Adwords migration: "Optimize For Conversions" will start from February 2012!

Google announced in December 2011 that starting in February 2012, they will be migrating Conversion Optimizer and Enhanced CPC campaigns to "Optimize for conversions".

Google said this will lead to a 5% increase in conversions, on average of all advertisers who switch. Google added:

“To ensure that your campaign settings are also in line with your conversion goals, we plan to migrate existing campaigns using Conversion Optimizer or Enhanced CPC with "Optimize for clicks" ad rotation to "Optimize for conversions" ad rotation.”

 

If you do not want to be migrated, tell Google by January 31st by using this form.

Here is a video with more details on this tool:

 

Google introduced Multiple Admin Function to Google+

As an early Christmas gift to the brands currently optimizing the Google+ brand pages, Google announced the introduction of the multiple admin features for brand pages.

According to the Blog post:

• You can now delegate up to 50 named managers as administrators for a page.
• A new notification flow will ensure that these managers stay in the loop on all the activity that takes place on a page, giving managers the ability to stay involved in page conversations.
• Show an aggregated count of users that have engaged with your page, either by +1’ing it or by adding it to a circle. This way, both you and your page’s visitors can get an at-a-glance summary of who is interacting with your page.

And as a couple of extra stocking fillers, Google has also updated the Google Photos experience with an updated light box, as well as adding a ‘volume’ slider which allows users to determine how much content from each Circle they want displaying in their main feed.

Not everyone will be able to see the updates yet, Google say the features will be rolled out completely over the next couple of days.

Google introduced ‘AdWords Premier SMB Partner Program’ !

Google launched its new 'AdWords Premier SMB Partner Program'. This vendor referral program has been designed for the small business advertisers who want to invest in AdWords. The small businesses will be referred to a list of companies that have been a part of Google's 'authorized reseller' program.

The idea behind becoming a SMB partner is that it will allow the company’s customer base to expand and deliver better, more direct and reportable results to the advertisers. Since only a chosen few highly qualified companies become Premier SMB Partners, that is why becoming a partner will help companies stand apart from the crowd.

The minimum criteria that you need to fulfill to be able to sign up for the program:

• Large existing customer base of small / medium sized businesses
• Tele / field sales force with the ability to sell Google’s advertising products
• Commitment to provide phone and/or email customer support to their advertiser base
• Existing operational infrastructure (billing, reporting, etc) to service thousands of customers

Google says that to become Premier Partner, the companies will have to undergo scrutiny (that includes training and testing) by Google. Also Google will instruct and supervise their product and sales positioning.

Google Sitelinks expanded to 12 Pack!

When you’re searching, you often have a specific task in mind, like figuring out which exhibits are showing at a nearby museum. Despite this narrow goal, people often start with a broad query, like [metropolitan museum of art], with no mention of exhibits. For these searches, the first result may include a list of links to specific sections of the site, which are called “sitelinks.”

Google has been testing really large expanded Sitelinks in the search results for some queries for the past few weeks.

After much testing, Google finally posted official confirmation that these new large sitelinks are here to stay.

Google said the Sitelinks will now be “full-size links with a URL and one line of snippet text.” The links and snippets will be very similar to the standard regular results, which Google says makes “it even easier to find the section of the site you want.” Plus, Google is upping the number of sitelinks from eight to twelve sitelinks for these queries.