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Latest Developments From Google & Overture
Friday, August 06, 2004
David Fischer, Director for Google's AdWords started out with Google's
new Image ads program. Pretty much the same story as AdWords for
all intents and purposes, difference being (as you may have guessed)
you have the ability to have an image served instead of a text ad.
Second on his list of was their new Smart Pricing program designed
introduce a new layer of relevance to click through results and
discount the price of less relevant. As David so aptly observed,
"not all click are created equal" and the idea behind
SmartPricing is to create a system whereby lower converting clicks
will cost less than clicks that convert at a higher rate.
Last thing on the Google's plate in this track was a brief discussion
about their local targeting. David exhibited some fairly amazing
drill down capabilities. We're not talking about plain ol' circle-radius.
Google has been playing with circles long enough it seems and now
wishes to offer a variety of novelty shapes for your searching pleasure.
Squares, triangles - lots of other polygons I don't know the names
of too, I'm sure. Basically you pick you points and their local
targeting will connect the dots -neat stuff.
Overture continues to add to its repertoire of tools for clients.
Dan Boberg, Director of Strategic Alliances gave us an overview
of some of Overture's latest toys. We'll be talking some more with
Overture this week so look for some more details to come, I will
say the SearchOptimizer sounds promising though.
The most memorable quotes from this session didn't come from Google
or Overture however. Dana Todd, one of the founding partners for
SiteLab International, was the lead off speaker and really had the
crowd's attention right of the bat with some great quotes and a
few good natured barbs flung in Google's direction. Here are a few
of my favorites:
"The Internet accounts for approximately 14% of user's media
consumption, but only 3% of total media budget."
"After roughly 7 years in existence, the Internet accounts
for almost 3% of total U.S. advertising. Reaching that level roughly
twice as fast as cable (TV) did in the 80's"
"(Google) launched something called ImageAds. Which looks
suspiciously like a banner ad network, but since Google invented
it, it's much different"
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