Relevant news, random thoughts, and infrequent rants. Calling it the way we see it , simply because we can.
The Value of Facebook Advertising
Today, comScore & Facebook released their second rendition of “The Power of Like.” The first was released almost a year ago, which is nicely summarized in this video. In these whitepapers, comScore showcases three brands (Starbucks, Southwest Airlines, and Bing), and describes their experiences with Facebook marketing and discusses some of their results. While comScore developed what appears to be a great tool for actually measuring certain elements of social media advertising, the whitepapers fall short of solidifying confidence in Facebook advertising in general.
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Goodbye Google Places
Farewell Google Places. Hello Google +. Try a few local-based searches on Google. What you’ll probably find is that the information previously contained on a Google Places page now exists only on Google + pages, with some additions. Most noticeable are the Scores in lieu of Stars. Formerly, each reviewer would rate the business between 0 and 5 stars. Now, reviewers can rate businesses between 0 and 3 points. Each business gets a score out of 30 points, calculated based on averaging these user reviews.
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Website Optimizer, Meet Google Analytics
Starting August 1 2012, the capabilities offered by Google’s Website Optimizer will be included in Google Analytics, effectively ending Website Optimizer as a stand-alone product. The change was announced last Friday, in this post.
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AdWords – Keyword Details & Auction Insights
As of May 22, Google officially re-branded the “See Search Terms” tool. It is now called “Keyword Details” and it functions almost exactly the same as “See Search Terms” – with one addition. For certain (high volume) keywords, Google created an additional layer of information – called Auction Insights – which include metrics related to: impression share, overlap rate, position above rate, and top of page rate compared to other domains.
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Microsoft Unvieils So.cl
Over the weekend, Microsoft announced their latest social media concept, dubbed “So.cl” – you can check it out here. Interestingly, you can sign into a So.cl account with your Facebook or Windows Live account, which seems to imply that So.cl would augment (rather than replace) your social media account(s). If you don’t already use Facebook or Windows Live, So.cl still works as a stand-alone application.
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The Google Knowledge Graph
Yesterday, Google announced it would be slowly introducing a number of changes which, collectively, amount to a relatively drastic alteration in SERPs – but only for certain types of queries. Their announcement of the “Knowledge Graph” elicited quite a reaction – within hours there was even a WSJ article about it, among others. The full effect of the update will not occur immediately, so we’ll have to see how it plays out.
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Google & Intuit Join Forces – “Get Your Business Online “
Over the last couple of months there has been a little buzz about Google & Intuit offering free website services. But until a few days ago, we hadn’t seen it for ourselves. This relatively new marketing initiative has been dubbed “Get Your Business Online” and is available to business throughout the country. According to their statistics, well over 50% of small businesses do not have websites – which presents Google with an obvious opportunity assuming they can cross-sell AdWords.
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The Future of Facebook Advertising
At the end of March 31, 2012, according to this WSJ article, Facebook had slightly north of 900m active monthly users. This is a lot – probably second only to Google (who doesn’t publish active monthly user numbers as far as I know). While this quantity of active monthly users is a testament to Facebook’s crowd-drawing ability, their ability to monetize that traffic is quite poor by comparison.
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AdWords Update
It has been an eventful couple of weeks, for all of you who follow what Google does with AdWords. As recently as April 17th 2012 during the Q&A session of the Q1 conference call, Larry Page said, and I’m paraphrasing, “..advertisers are focusing on driving ROI.” While this observation is quite logical, I believed it was simply a reiteration of Google’s unspoken, sacred oath: don’t mess with advertisers’ ability to drive ROI.
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Google’s Q1 2012 Conference Call
I’ll start of by saying that I own neither Google shares nor Google debt. This is not about whether Google makes for a good investment or not, rather it is intended to highlight some of the more interesting aspects of the conference call and financial results, released April 12, 2012.
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