Measuring Success in a Multi-Device World!!

We live in a multi-device world, and if you're still focused on improving your visibility, traffic, and conversions solely for desktop users, you're losing a great opportunity. This gap, coupled with the fact that you're probably staying behind your competitors and unconnected with your audience, is not great for business.

Mobile search is booming. It's already driving important multi-channel conversions.

This Thursday, Google will  discuss strategies and best practices for measuring customer behavior, and also will look at how Google Analytics and other Google tools can help you measure and respond to the evolving customer journey.

 

Google added six new Data types to Data Highlighter tool!

Google introduced  data highlighter tool in December 2012 in order to let tech-savvy webmasters markup their event based data. The tool however, worked only with the event data.

Recently,  Google updated the tool to  support for six additional data types. It is expected that Google will continue to add more data types of the highlighter tool.

Currently You can use Data Highlighter to teach Google about the following types of data on your site:

Articles Events Local Businesses

Movies Products Software Applications

TV Episodes

 

Make the most of Google Shopping!

On June the 11th, Google Shopping will completely change the way it exists and operates, undertaking a fully commercial model – a change that shall effect search results in a wide range of countries from the United Kingdom all the way to Brazil.

Advertisers in the United Kingdom, Germany, France, Japan, Italy, Spain, the Netherlands, Brazil, Australia, Switzerland and the Czech Republic will need to run Product Listing Ads to promote their products on Google Shopping.

Google says over one billion products are now being promoted through PLAs on Google Shopping, driven by a 300% year-over-year increase in participation from merchants, aggregators and marketplaces.

Traffic to retailers from Google Shopping increased 20% from last year.

 

DoubleClick Search Tools To Migrate To Enhanced Campaigns!

Last month, the DoubleClick Search team introduced the beta release of dedicated tools to help advertisers seamlessly upgrade to enhanced campaigns. Recently, they announced that these tools are available to all DoubleClick Search customers globally.

With this release, advertisers can save time when upgrading to enhanced campaigns with custom solutions. The tools are designed to guide users in identifying similar campaigns that target different devices and merge them into one enhanced campaign in five steps.

Google introduced monthly Top charts and new search trend visualizer to Google Trends!

Every year Google creates a summary Zeitgeist feature to sum up the year in search data, showing what has been the most popular among its users. And now, Google introduced "spirit of the times" Top Charts feature that will display over 40 categories of Top 10 lists of people, places, and things, on the basis of the search interest, a new monthly series of lists similar to that year-end feature, available on Google Trends.

It’s built on Google’s Knowledge Graph, and provides a representation of the actual things people are interested in, rather than just keywords alone.

There’s also a very cool animated visualized of the top trending search terms, which indicates what’s being actively searched for at this very moment, with a colorful background and smooth animated transitions. This tool is customizable as well, so you can view up to 25 searches at a time and set it for different regions.

Google officially rolled out Penguin 2.0!

The much anticipated Google Penguin update has finally become a reality following confirmation that the latest generation of the algorithm update has been rolled out throughout their search engine results pages.

Google’s Matt Cutts in a blog post stated that, "We started rolling out the next generation of the Penguin webspam algorithm this afternoon (May 22, 2013), and the rollout is now complete. About 2.3% of English-US queries are affected to the degree that a regular user might notice. The change has also finished rolling out for other languages world-wide. The scope of Penguin varies by language, e.g. languages with more webspam will see more impact.

This is the fourth Penguin-related launch Google has done, but because this is an updated algorithm (not just a data refresh), we’ve been referring to this change as Penguin 2.0 internally."

Google introduced the Display Benchmarks Tool!

Google introduced Display Benchmarks tool to give advertisers and agencies up-to-the-month access to its industry performance benchmarks for display advertising.

Display Benchmarks tool presents aggregated ad performance data that can be filtered according to variables such as click-through rates, ad interaction times,  video completion rates, and other metrics.  And it works across ad formats/sizes (including mobile), verticals, and regions.

Google updated Adwords Editor for more Enhanced Campaigns features!

Google introduced a new version of AdWords Editor. The latest version features more ways to make bulk changes to enhanced campaigns.

With the new version, you can:

• Set bid adjustments for placements, topics, and audiences.
• Set mobile bid adjustments at the ad group level.
• Upgrade campaigns in bulk using CSV import or the Add/update multiple campaigns tool.
• Use the new ValueTrack {ifmobile}, {ifnotmobile} parameters.

In addition, keyword performance metrics in Display Network campaigns are available on the Keywords tab. Performance statistics by targeted location are available in the Locations tab; and, audiences, placements and topics stats in Editor now reflect the data you see in your AdWords accounts.

The next time you launch AdWords Editor, you'll see a prompt to upgrade to version 10.1. To learn more about upgrading.

Google officially launched Keyword Planner!

Google officially launched Keyword Planner, which is the combination of the Keyword Tool and the Traffic Estimator into one tool,  both of which will be sun setting about 60 days.

Keyword Planner also comes with some new features, including the ability to find new keyword and ad group ideas by “multiplying” keywords (combining two or more lists to generate new keywords). It will now let you target individual cities and regions within a country.

It also lets you add keyword and group ideas to a “plan,” which Google describes as a shopping cart of ideas that you can add to a current or new campaign.

Google+ gets some major facelift!

Google rolling out big changes for the Google+ platform. The new Google Plus interface focuses more on photo and video content. It gives more importance to an improved visibility and inclusion of graphical objects on the page.

The home page for G+ now has up to three columns populated with individual cards for posts and pictures, and the social network can intelligently learn the content of those posts and automatically add related hashtags for you. Columns appear or disappear depending upon the size of your screen, and cards can be flipped to reveal editing options, or moved to suit users' aesthetic tastes.