Google has redesigned the homepage for its AdWords advertiser interface in an effort to bring more relevant, customized information up front for marketers. The main change for the "home" tab is that advertisers can create their own modules based on saved filters created on the campaign interface. Filters let advertisers identify problems with their campaigns, including low-performing keywords, keywords that don't appear on the homepage, ads that aren't showing, or keywords that are high-cost but low-performing. Modules displaying the result of the saved filters can be placed on the homepage [...]

Related Topics: Channel: SEM | Google: AdWords

Some day, the McGee family is going to pack our bags and hightail it to Hawaii. We've never been there and would love to spend a week or two on the beaches, in the mountains, and enjoying the weather. But we have no idea which island to visit. Sound familiar? Maybe you want to to head to Australia, Ireland, or somewhere else but you don't know exactly where to go for the best vacation fit. Bing has a new tool that might help. Its destination pages now let searchers compare several destinations at once in a familiar side-by-side layout. Here's what it looks like when you start to compare th [...]

Related Topics: Channel: Consumer | Microsoft: Bing Travel

Earlier this week, Google's Matt Cutts announced they will be releasing a new on-page spam detection technique to reduce the amount of content spam we see in Google. Matt Cutts just confirmed the rumors that this algorithm is indeed live. Matt said the change to their algorithm to prevent low quality scraper content in Google's index was "approved at our weekly quality launch meeting last Thursday and launched earlier this week." Based on tracking Webmasters, I believe the rollout was on January 26th and 27th, I have more on that at the Search Engine Roundtable and there is more coverag [...]

Related Topics: Channel: SEO | Google: SEO | Google: Web Search | Top News

In this week's Search In Pictures, here are the latest images culled from the web, showing what people eat at the search engine companies, how they play, who they meet, where they speak, what toys they have, and more. Google Mannequins In Server Racks: Google Voice Pick Up Lines: Google's New Venice Beach Office: Freezing At Yahoo's Canada Office: [...]

Related Topics: Channel: Other | Search In Pictures

Online marketers have realized that traditional metrics such as sales, brand wareness, attitudes etc., are not enough to show return on investment. In fact, some academic studies have shown that marketing actions that improve short term sales may actually harm long term profitability of a brand. Further, with improvements in data mining and warehousing, marketers have enormous amounts of data to analyze and convert into actionable insights. Customer Lifetime Value (CLV) was once an esoteric metric that lived in the domain of direct response marketers. Now, online marketers are adopting i [...]

Related Topics: Channel: Analytics | Search & Analytics

Microsoft announced second quarter earnings yesterday, which beat Wall Street's expectations. The company reported a lot of good news about its revenues, profits and products, including Windows (PC) 7, Kinect/Xbox and Office. However Online Services, which houses all Microsoft's online operations including MSN and Bing, posted a $543 million loss. That's up from $463 a year ago. The company is on track to lose $2 billion for the year in that division, though ad revenues are up 23 percent. There was very little discussion of search in particular or Windows Phones except for the fo [...]

Related Topics: Channel: SEM | Microsoft: Bing | Microsoft: Bing Ads | Microsoft: Business Issues | Microsoft: General | Top News

For my past several columns, I’ve presented a number of interviews exploring where search might go in the future. Through that process, I ran across an interesting video from a company based in Sweden called TAT*, short for The Astonishing Tribe. The "Tribe" helps create unique user experiences that keep up with the rapidly evolving frontier of screen technologies. I reached out and made contact with Hampus Jakobsson, TAT Co-Founder and now Strategic Alliances EMEA at Research in Motion. Hampus and I spent about 40 freewheeling minutes on the phone and in those 40 minutes, we covered a lo [...]

Related Topics: Channel: Content | Search & Usability

Search Week is an exclusive weekly newsletter for Search Engine Land premium members that recaps stories covered on Search Engine Land over the past week. Below are top stories organized by topic that happened over the past week. Each topic (or Search Engine Land column) is also a link, where you can click through and drill into the Search Engine Land members library to find other stories in that area. Because some stories are listed in more than one category, you may see them repeated. Top News Google Links To Competitors Next To YouTube Videos Seznam.cz Disputes Google's [...]

Related Topics: Channel: Other | Search Week

Search Week is an exclusive weekly newsletter for Search Engine Land premium members that recaps stories covered on Search Engine Land over the past week. Below are top stories organized by topic that happened over the past week. Each topic (or Search Engine Land column) is also a link, where you can click through and drill into the Search Engine Land members library to find other stories in that area. Because some stories are listed in more than one category, you may see them repeated. Top News Google Partner Brings Big Data To Product Search Why You're Still Waiting For Hul [...]

Related Topics: Channel: Other | Search Week

Speaking today at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, outgoing Google CEO Eric Schmidt deflected suggestions that Google is in competition with the likes of Apple and Facebook, and rejected speculation that those fights are the real reason that Larry Page is taking the CEO's chair. As Forbes reports, Schmidt told journalists that his recent role change "has nothing to do with competitors." He reiterated Google's earlier statements that the CEO change is about streamlining authority at the top, a subject that Greg Sterling wrote about earlier today: Larry Page And The Reinvention [...]

Related Topics: Apple | Channel: Social | Facebook | Google: Business Issues | Google: Employees | Top News

SMX West will feature three jam-packed days with over 60 sessions of cutting-edge content on SEO, paid search, social media marketing, local and mobile search marketing, analytics and more. SMX West is programmed by Danny Sullivan and Chris Sherman, the editors of Search Engine Land. Save up to $250 on an All Access pass - register by Feb 5th for early bird rates. Want to send a team? Discounts of up to 35% are available – check out our group pricing. Register Today for SMX West! [...]

Related Topics: Channel: Other | Sponsor Messages

Below is what happened in search today, as reported on Search Engine Land and from other places across the web. From Search Engine Land: The New York Times, Demand Media EditionDemand Media — widely described as a “content farm” — went public yesterday and quickly racked up a valuation higher than the New York Times. I figured the news might cause some at the New York Times to wonder if they needed to be more Demand Media-like. Would every story be turned into a question? [...] 6 Content Tips: How To Write When You Have Nothing To Write AboutWhen I tell a clie [...]

Related Topics: Channel: Other | SearchCap

Demand Media -- widely described as a "content farm" -- went public yesterday and quickly racked up a valuation higher than the New York Times. I figured the news might cause some at the New York Times to wonder if they needed to be more Demand Media-like. Would every story be turned into a question? How might that look? So I did a mockup. Here's what I started out with, the real New York Times home page, from just before noon Eastern Time. Click on the image to enlarge it: And here's what I call the "Demandified" version, which you can also click on to enlarge: In Seriousness.. [...]

Related Topics: Channel: SEO | Content Farms | Features: Analysis | Top News

When I tell a client/friend/colleague they need to add X pages of interesting content to their site, I typically hear one of three answers: 3% of the time: "No problem, I'm on it." 75% of the time: "But I don't have anything to write about." 22% of the time: "No one wants to hear about my product/service. It's boring." I'll ignore the obvious replies, like "If it's so boring, why does anyone buy it?" or "Then why can you talk about your product for 2 hours at a party?" I understand how tough it can be to come up with material. When you spend all your time working in your business, d [...]

Related Topics: All Things SEO | Channel: SEO | How To: SEO

Google appears to be testing display ads in Gmail. I discovered the following image ad in my own Gmail account this morning, and Google has since confirmed a test. Image ads have made their way into paid search on Google.com and various other properties on Google. But this was really jarring for me to encounter. It's the only such ad I saw (next to an email from a clothing retailer in my inbox) after purposely looking for others. I'm sure it's a test to see how users react and what the response rates are. Gmail is formally a part of the "Google Display Network": Your text, image, ri [...]

Related Topics: Channel: Display | Google: AdSense | Google: Gmail | Top News

ReadWrite/Web reports Microsoft's Principal Scientist of Bing has left to join the Twitter team. Alek Kołcz, formerly a Scientist at Microsoft Live Labs, a co-chair at CIKM and a System Architect at AOL is now at Twitter. The Twitter employee page has Alek's Twitter avatar and @zorbageek linked to at the bottom. There has not been any official confirmation or announcement from Twitter or Bing outside of this employee page update. ReadWrite/Web said: Kołcz is an info-science heavy, having published numerous research articles in publications like The Journal of Supercomputing, Ne [...]

Related Topics: Channel: Industry | Microsoft: Employees

We're watching something really fascinating happening at Google: a very public effort to prevent the company from falling prey to the kind of bureaucratic molasses that has enveloped so many companies before it. Many have complained that Google is already there. Perhaps. But it's nothing like at Nokia, for example, which continues to struggle with its highly bureaucratic culture and lethargic decision-making as it slowly loses share to Apple and Google in the handset market. The primary meme that has emerged in the single week since Google revealed its now widely dissected CEO switch is: Pa [...]

Related Topics: Channel: Industry | Features: Analysis | Google: Business Issues | Google: Employees

Traffic acquisition has always had a prominent spot on yearly goals and product roadmaps. But how about conversion optimization? Not quite there yet, despite all the talk about ROI positive initiatives. Traffic is undoubtedly the first step, but conversions are where the money and long term value reside. Conversion optimization has been predicted as one of the top SEO strategies for 2011. Shopping engines can drive tons of traffic from qualified, targeted buyers to your products. How about conversions? It’s time to ask. If you are tracking conversions, you’re in the game. Here’s how t [...]

Related Topics: Channel: Retail | Search & Retail | Search Engines: Shopping Search Engines

As it promised in early December, Google has begun to remove terms associated with piracy from producing search results in Google Instant Search, and from appearing in Google Suggest. That includes searches involving the word "torrent" as well as "BitTorrent," which is both the name of a company in San Francisco that produces torrent software, as well as the peer-to-peer sharing protocol itself. Google promised this was coming in a December 2, 2010 blog post that addressed several issues related to copyright protection. The company said it would remove terms like this from autocomplete: [...]

Related Topics: Channel: SEO | Google: Instant | Google: Legal | Google: Suggest | Legal: Copyright | Top News

Google: Go to the head of the class. Wikipedia: You stay after school for extra tutoring. That seems to be one of the conclusions you can draw from a fun blog post today by Wolfram|Alpha founder Stephen Wolfram. Writing about the Jeopardy battle between past champions Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter and IBM's Watson computer (the computer won a dry run earlier this month), Wolfram decided to see how several search engines would fare when asked to answer Jeopardy clues. The results? Google scored highest in both having the answer show up anywhere on the first page of search results and ha [...]

Related Topics: Blekko | Channel: Consumer | Google: Web Search | Microsoft: Bing | Search Engines: Answer Search Engines | Search Engines: Yandex | Wolfram Alpha | Yahoo: Search