Archive for April, 2010

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Collecta Offers Up Real-Time Stream API

Thursday, April 15th, 2010

Real-time search provider Collecta released a new API program. “Starting today, developers can plug into Collecta’s network for free,” a representative for the company told Web Pro News. “In light of the recent Tweetie acquisition, we believe that taking advantage of Collecta’s Twitter-compatible, 15+M source real-time network can give developers a real competitive edge.”

“Developers have built some amazing applications using data from Twitter’s network,” said Collecta CEO Gerry Campbell. “Collecta’s API allows developers to extend their tools far beyond Twitter, to the rest of the real-time web.”

Collecta’s Twitter-compatible API delivers real-time web search results in a format that’s simple to integrate into any application on the desktop, mobile or web.

Sites like MySpace are using Collecta already and announced that many followers will more than likely join them.

“We want to support the explosion of creativity in the real-time space,” said Campbell. “We love seeing new, clever ways to take advantage of Collecta’s real-time data. We’ve done a lot of the hard work to create the real-time stream so that app companies can focus on their specific ideas.”

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Google Does Some Overdue Buzz Branding with New Buttons

Wednesday, April 14th, 2010

Google introduced new Buzz buttons for content providers. The buttons allow users to share content through Buzz without having to leave the site they’re currently on, which makes the buttons easy for readers to follow a publication on Buzz. Now anyone can go there and simply create their own Buzz buttons.

“A number of sharing platforms, including ShareThis, Meebo, Shareholic, AddThis and AddtoAny have also incorporated the Google Buzz button into their sharing functionality, so you’ll see Buzz listed as a choice when you go to share something on many other sites around the web as well,” notes Product Manager Mussie Shorek.

If you want to create a “Post to Buzz” button, just pick the style, location of post count, language, URL to post and image to post. You will then get a code from Google to add. Users can test the button by reloading the page you added it to make sure it shows up and can click the link to see the posting box that other users will see.

This new feature can help keep the hype going around for Buzz.

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Bing Just Now Starting Real-Time Search (Twitter) Integration

Wednesday, April 14th, 2010

Microsoft announced that Bing is now pulling in tweets from Twitter in real-time, which resembles Google’s real-time search feature. This integration isn’t exactly new either. Bing started including tweets from certain people in search engines last summer.

Bing’s Lawrence Kim describes its new “social search” feature by saying:

Bing now pulls in social content generated on Twitter to surface the most relevant updates within seconds of a breaking news event. From people on the ground tweeting about what’s happening around them to users sharing interesting news links while browsing at home, the Twitterati can be significantly faster than traditional media outlets in picking up information on breaking events. Further, the Twitterati also picks up information that the traditional media outlets often ignore – such as the latest viral video being shared online.

At Bing, we analyze what topics are generating the most interest on Twitter to bring you the latest and most interesting content. So if you wanted to find out more information on the just-announced Kin phone from Microsoft, you’ll be able to discover it on Bing as the announcement was being made and journalists started tweeting about the product.

Whether or not Bing will integrate Twitter’s new promoted tweets in its social feature is unknown at this time.

Currently, this new feature is being tested with a small amount of Bing users and queries, but the company says it will be available in the U.S. soon.

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Google AdWords Beginner’s Guide- Ad Basics

Tuesday, April 13th, 2010

Your content and target audience of your ad in your Google AdWords campaign is the most important thing when trying to bring in potential customers. When your ads are clear, specific and compelling, then more people will want to click on them.

Ad position on the page
Now that you’ve got your ad to your targeted audience, the position of your ad on the page will be based on its Ad Rank. The ad that has the highest Ad Rank will appear in the first position and so on. Ad Rank on search results page will be based on your keyword’s Quality Score and cost per click (CPC).

Where and to whom your ad can appear
You can decide where on the web you want your ad to appear, as long as it’s on Google search results pages or relevant websites across the Google Network. In your Google AdWordsaccount, you can also control who sees your ad by targeting your ad to a certain audience through keywords, language, country or region.

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Google AdWords Beginner’s Guide- Measure Success with Keywords

Tuesday, April 13th, 2010

With Google AdWords each advertiser looks at success differently based on your business goals. There are a few things to look for when it comes to figuring out whether your ads and keywords are performing well.

To measure your success with keywords, it’s important to understanding how monitoring keywords work.

Keyword Status: Go to your keywords tab to see a keyword performance overview and to check out the status of each of the keywords being used in your Google AdWords campaign. In order for your keywords to be eligible to triggers ads, the status will say “eligible.”

Clickthrough Rate: CTR is the most important metric used to determine the success of your keyword. Your CTR can be found on the keywords tab in your Google AdWords account. If your keywords are below a 1% on the CTR, then they are too general, but can easily be fixed on Google and the Search Network by deleting those keywords and using more specific and targeted keywords instead.

Quality Score: This part of your Google AdWords account displays your keyword’s quality score that helps you monitor its performance.

Search Query Reports: On every keywords tab, there will be the actual search terms that are bringing in traffic to your ads. To pull a full report, click “see search terms”. This information is used to determine which keywords in your Google AdWords campaign are the most successful.

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Get Expert Help From A Pay Per Click Company

Tuesday, April 13th, 2010

Companies are currently using Pay Per Click (PPC) more now than ever before as the Internet marketing industry gets even more popular. Getting your pay per click campaign up and running is no easy task and, without any knowledge, you can waste a lot of time and money on keywords that take could bring down your pay per click campaign.

When your company needs pay per click help, turn to the experts at Windy City Strategies, because we’re here to help. We’ll give you the results by bringing qualified and relevant traffic to your website through targeted pay per click campaigns with Google, Yahoo and Bing platforms to get you the biggest return on investment.

Every month, you’ll receive a monthly keyword analysis report which will outline Web site clicks, click through rates, costs, conversion rates and cost per conversion. Your Windy City Strategies account manager will give you advice on maximizing your results even more. No other company can offer you the pay per click help that Windy City Strategies provides.

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Google AdWords Beginner’s Guide- Measure Success with Ads

Monday, April 12th, 2010

With Google AdWords each advertiser looks at success differently based on your business goals. There are a few things to look for when it comes to figuring out whether your ads and keywords are performing well.

Look at your Ads tab to see if they are running. In the status column, you’ll see the information on the current status of each ad. If you click the icon of a speech bubble, you’ll be able to see the summary of your ad’s status.

To get a faster idea of how well your ads are doing, check the clickthrough rate (CTR) on your ads tab. This will show how often users are clicking your ads. Just note, a CTR under 1% on Google and the Search Networks shows that your ads are not targeted to a relevant audience. If your number is below this, try improving your ads as soon as possible.

The ad performance report will let you view performance data for your ads; this includes average position, clicks and impressions, CTR and cost.

If you have more than one ad in your ad group, your ads will be rotated and taking turns showing. When you compare these ads, you can see which ones your customers think is the most compelling.

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Google AdWords Beginner’s Guide- Parts of an Ad

Monday, April 12th, 2010

Your content and target audience of your ad in your Google AdWords campaign is the most important thing when trying to bring in potential customers. When your ads are clear, specific and compelling, then more people will want to click on them.

Important Parts of an Ad
There are several parts that make up each ad in your Google AdWords campaign:

Your headline is the first line of your ad and will link back to your website. The best headlines will relate directly to the keywords being searched, so it’s important to include at least one of your keywords in the headline.

Use two lines of text to describe the product or service you’re offering or advertising. Your ad space is limited, so use important detail and benefits of your product or service.

You will have a destination URL set, but it won’t be visible in your ad. This URL, or landing page, will be the exact page within your site where you want to send users to directly from your ad. It’s important to pick the page of your website that’s the most relevant to the product or service in your ad.

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Google Makes Site Speed A Ranking Factor

Monday, April 12th, 2010

Google announced that it’s started to factor site speed into its search rankings. Bloggers Amit Singhal and Matt Cutts both stated that site is speed is something that everyone should pay attention to.

“Speeding up websites is important – not just to site owners, but to all Internet users. Faster sites create happy users and we’ve seen in our internal studies that when a site responds slowly, visitors spend less time there. But faster sites don’t just improve user experience; recent data shows that improving site speed also reduces operating costs.”

If you’re interested in this, there are some free, Google-approved tools that used to check site speed: PageSpeed, YSlow and WebPagetest.

They both wrote, “While site speed is a new signal, it doesn’t carry as much weight as the relevance of a page. Currently, fewer than 1% of search queries are affected by the site speed signal in our implementation and the signal for site speed only applies for visitors searching in English on Google.com at this point.”

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Google AdWords Performance Basics

Friday, April 9th, 2010

With a Google AdWords campaign, it’s about results. It’s crucial to know that what you want to gain from the ad campaign and plan out how it will measure to that success.

There are a few things you’ll want to monitor during your Google AdWords campaign to make sure it’s performing well.

  • Are you ads running?
  • Is your Quality Score good?
  • Are you making a profile?
  • Are you meeting your goals?

It’s important to know what your advertising goals are. What do you want to achieve with your Google AdWords campaign and what’s the beast way to measure your success? For example:

Goal: Increase qualified visits to your site.
Measure: Use the charts and other graphs on your Campaigns tab to see how many clicks your ad receives.

This type of reporting will show how your Google AdWords account can provide you with all the information to show how your advertising performance. There will be performance summary graphs on most tabs of your campaigns tab. The graphs make it even easier to track the data you’re interested in the most. You can also get an idea pretty quickly on how your performance changes over time.

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